


Let's All Go To Hell In A Fast Car

by southspinner



Category: Panic! at the Disco, Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Ryden
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-17 21:24:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 154,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Supernatural Crossover] Things that were only thought to be myths and nightmares pay a visit to Las Vegas one night with only one goal in mind: chaos. It culmilates in a violent murder of the Urie family in a way that shocks the whole city. The only survivor? Brendon Urie, a boy who thought his existence would never be anything other than lukewarm. Now faced with a quest for revenge and survival so staggering it would scare off even the gods themselves, he finds help in stranger Ryan Ross; loner, roamer, and supernatural hunter. They recruit other souls along the way to aid them in their quest. And it's a good thing, too. Doing it alone could mean the end of mankind as they know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue - Brendon

Throughout my entire life, the one thing that always struck me about my mother was her seemingly infinite patience. Twenty-one years with her, watching her bring up me and six other rowdy boys, and it always seemed like she never even broke a sweat. Sure, the world these days likes to look down its nose at stay-at-home moms, but I’d love to see _them_ juggle seven sons and a husband and god-knows-how-many grandkids. And she does it all with a smile on her face. Have I seen her disappointed? Yeah, tons. Sad? Of course. But the most amazing thing is that in twenty-one years, I’ve never seen Mom get mad.

Which is why when she reaches across the dinner table and rips my father’s throat out with her bare hands, I get the indication that something might be wrong.

What started out as the usual Sunday dinner at the Urie house turns into a nightmare in less than a minute. One second my oldest brother Matt is asking his wife to pass the turkey, the next they’re both choking around knives shoved into their tracheas and everyone is screaming and chaos explodes. Except for me, that is. I just sit numbly in my chair as the blood and horror flings through the air around me, wondering when I’m going to wake up. My voice doesn’t want to work, trapped in the constricted lining of my throat, but I manage to choke out a small, stupid question. “Mom?”

When she turns to me, a wicked smile on her face that doesn’t look right at all, her eyes flash into solid disks of bright, poisonous green. “Guess again, sweetheart.”

And that’s when I run.

I can’t even make sense of what I’m doing, sprinting out of the kitchen, slipping on the pooling blood of my brothers and their wives and their kids, bile rising in my throat and painting a bitter stain against the backs of my teeth. This isn’t happening, this can’t be happening because monsters aren’t real and they definitely aren’t my mother. But my subconscious isn’t warped enough to spin this kind of dream; I’ve never known what death smells like or how the rattle of someone’s last breath sounds. That’s not something I could imagine, and as my feet pound up the stairs in time with my rapid-fire heartbeat, I’m starting to think that if this is reality then I want to go to sleep and never wake up again. If this is reality, then I just watched half of my family dying. If this is reality, the other half of them are downstairs dying right now.

Dad isn’t - wasn’t, oh God - one of those gun-toting NRA crazies, but living in Vegas comes with its own unique set of paranoias and there’s been an old .22 rifle in a footlocker in the back of my parents’ closet for as long as I can remember. On every Urie boy’s tenth birthday, he would be taken down to a local rifle range and taught to shoot it, after which he’d receive a long talk about how it was only to be used in the protection of the family and was certainly _not_ a toy. I’m ten years old again as my shaking hands yank open the top of the footlocker and start stuttering through the motions I never thought I’d have to use - Safety on. Click. Rounds in magazine. Click-click-click. Magazine in rifle. Click. Bolt pulled back. Click. Safety off. Click.

My breath is coming in panicked, wheezing gasps by the time I force myself to head back into the grisly carnage downstairs, spatters of too-bright red painting the walls and horrible, wet sound of tearing flesh and gurgling almost-screams traveling around the corner from the dining room. I’ve never had much courage to begin with, I guess, but any I might have ever had deserts me the second I see my littlest niece’s glassy, empty eyes fixed on the ceiling overhead. If this is reality, it’s not _my_ reality. My reality is wonderful and boring and totally safe, a semester away from wrapping up my Music Ed degree, some house somewhere in the future with a picket fence and ‘Urie’ in faded letters on the mailbox, a million more Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthday dinners with Matt stealing the last goddamn roll like he’s been doing since I was old enough to eat them. Whatever my reality is, it can’t be this. It’s not watching whatever terrifying thing that looks like my mother drop another of her grandchildren’s limp bodies to the floor, covered head to toe in sticky red. It’s not the eerie, dead silence that cuts all the way down to the core of me. It’s not me aiming a rifle at her head and pulling the trigger.

And it certainly isn’t her standing there with a hole in her skull, laughing like I just told the funniest joke of the century. I don’t even have the time for a ‘what the fuck’ before I’m flying backwards through the air, carried by invisible hands. My back hits the wall hard enough that I dent the drywall, something holding me at least a foot off the ground and putting a crushing pressure on my lungs. Air won’t come, my head swims, and through the fuzziness eating away at the edges of my vision there’s nothing but fear, fear and red and death and a million other things I didn’t ever want to experience. “Mom...”

“Mommy’s not home right now, dearest,” the thing smiles, walking over and stroking the side of my face, leaving a trail of someone else’s blood across my skin. “You just shot her in the head. I, on the other hand, am still kicking. Really, Brendon, I’m disappointed. You thought that little peashooter would be enough? You saw me crush your brother’s intestines with a blink. You’re not playing Grand Theft Auto here, sweet cheeks.”

“Wh-why?” I wheeze because it’s the only thing running through my mind that isn’t an incoherent screech of fear and pain and loss. I look around at the bloody ruins of my family and all I can think is _why, why, why,_ why did this happen to us, why are all of those evil monsters under the bed I never believed in real, why am I still alive?

The thing that used to be my mother’s smile turns feral, the hand pressed would-be soothingly against my cheek digging nails into the skin behind my ear until pain blazes across my synapses and a hot trail of blood starts flowing down the side of my neck. “Because I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, Brendon Urie. And I got bored.”

“But why _me?_ ” The oxygen deprivation is taking its toll, a tingling sensation starting to spark at my fingertips and the world spinning unstably around me. I’ve never really been morbid enough to give any consideration to the way I’m going to die, but I would never have imagined this, choked out by some monster with my mom’s face in the bloody wreck of my own living room. She’s been waiting for _me,_ and that’s what hits me like a locomotive through the fog of my wavering consciousness. All of this? It’s my fault. My whole family is dead because of me. “What could you possibly want from me?”

Humming contemplatively, the thing holds its hand aloft, the gold of Mom’s wedding band stained a hideously vibrant crimson. It smiles at me like I’m missing the point here, shaking its head and starting to pace back and forth. “Your blood, silly boy. Poor little Brendon, always wanting to be _normal,_ always dreaming about living a boring, simple life. Humans romanticize mediocrity so much; it’s a little sickening. It must be horrible for you to find out that you’re special. But you are, sweetheart, you’re _so_ special. And that special blood of yours is going to blast the gates open forever.”

An icy chill shoots down my spine like a thousand razorblades, my survival instinct making a last-ditch effort to kick into high gear in the face of the newest threat. “So you’re going to kill me.”

“Well _duh,_ ” the thing giggles in a way that’s far too similar to my mother’s laugh, ruffling my hair and taking a few steps backwards to look me up and down. “But not yet. The time isn’t right yet, but like I said, I got bored. I needed a little something to keep me entertained. So what I want you to do, Brendon...” Whatever’s holding me up against the wall relaxes, and I slump to the floor with a jarring thud, gasping for breath and only able to watch through watery eyes as the thing kneels down next to me and pets the blood-matted hair back from my face. I can hear the smile in her voice as her lips brush the shell of my ear, and something between terror and disgust swells in my veins. “...is _run._ Run as far and as fast as you can, and see if you can actually give me a bit of sport.”

A greenish column of smoke rises up the stairs, out a second-story window, and my mother’s body falls to the ground. Shaking violently and trying as hard as I possibly can not to throw up, I manage to make it to my feet. She said to run.

Don’t have to tell me twice.

* * *

The alarm on my phone beeps harshly - I traded in my iPhone for a cheap Tracfone from a gas station weeks ago, no name or GPS to follow me around like a blazing beacon - pulling me out of the same nightmare I have every time I shut my eyes and into the nightmare that follows me around when I’m awake. Sighing, I smack the stupid thing against the bedside table until it shuts up, eyes fixed on the water-damaged ceiling. Day thirty-two on the run.

They’re still looking for me back in Vegas. I was long-gone before the news reports came out and thank Christ the national networks never picked up the story, but I’m smart enough to stay as far away as humanly possible from Nevada for the rest of my life, however long that is. For all the hype they make about how plugged-in everyone is these days, it’s really not that hard to disappear. It was an easy enough process to follow, even for me, addled and bloodstained and scared out of my mind.

In the minutes after all hell broke loose, I ran upstairs, threw everything I thought I’d need into a duffel bag - clothes, laptop, all the cash in the house, and the .22 I still had clutched in my hand. Took a shower, threw up when I saw the water in the drain turn from red to pink to clear, washed myself off again. Went to the bank, emptied my account, cashed all the savings bonds my grandma had given me for every single birthday. All told, I hopped a Greyhound out of Vegas toting about fifteen thousand dollars in cash. About three grand, innumerable bus rides, and enough stress to give anyone an ulcer later, I’m waking up in a gross motel somewhere in Minnesota, completely anonymous. There’s something about that anonymity that makes me feel hollow.

I’ve taken myself completely off the grid. Chucked my phone in a ditch just outside of Phoenix, changed the IP address on my laptop a million times, deleted my Facebook, MySpace, everything, stayed at motels that are skeevy enough to accept cash and false names. I’m a nonentity. Brendon Urie, the invisible man. Or at least, I hope I’m invisible. I’ve got something on my tail that’s a hell of a lot scarier than the cops.

How long can I keep this up? That’s generally my first thought every morning as I try to muster up the will to get out of bed, pack up, and move on. I haven’t stayed anywhere for longer than three days, and the transience is starting to wear me down. I’ve lost sight of anything beyond peeling wallpaper and the tacky 1980’s carpeting down the center aisles of buses. The guy in the next room and his hooker are yelling about payment.

I am so far from home. I am so, so far from home.

Suddenly feeling sickened by listening to the debauched snatches of someone else’s story, I grab for the remote and burrow further under the threadbare covers. Despite its skeeviness, the motel does have HBO, which is as close to a plus as I get these days. I stay in bed and watch a half-finished Game of Thrones episode until my stomach starts complaining loudly enough that I eventually do get up long enough to go rifle through my backpack, rewarded with a stale granola bar that’s been floating around in there for at least a week. Breakfast of champions.

Guy and Hooker are still shouting next door, Jaime Lannister is carving some guy to pieces on TV, and all that red jogs memories I’d rather not think about. Gagging, I scramble for the remote and abandon my granola bar on the table, clicking over to some banal local news station. Safe enough. Seeing a stupid story on a Chihuahua that learned to water-ski or some shit never hurt anyone.

“And on a more disturbing note, yet another group of campers has gone missing in Itasca State Park,” the almost-pretty anchorwoman reports gravely, a picture flashing behind her of a tent that’s been ripped to ribbons. “Park rangers are sticking with their belief that the cause of the recent disappearances is a common enough series of bear attacks, but the discovery of a body in the most recent devastation has left others wondering just how big of a bear we’re looking at. Jim Taverson is on the scene.”

The camera clicks over to Jim Taverson, standing in a clearing of massive trees in his Channel Four windbreaker, looking solemn. “Thanks, Diane. Now, the wilderness around here is no stranger to bear attacks, but what makes the eyebrows raise on this one is that the group of campers attacked was actually a _hunting_ party. These men were armed to the teeth and were seasoned hunters, so it begs the question - how does one bear drag off four full-grown, armed men and leave a frankly grisly corpse behind? The body has been identified as Elk River resident Terry Whitmarsh, but only with the aid of dental records. Witnesses say the body was mangled, practically torn apart, not like any bear attack they’d ever heard of. Worrisome stuff here at Itasca State Park -”

My hands are trembling as I press the power button on the remote, staring blankly ahead at the dead screen. I know something that could rip a man apart as easily as looking at him. I know something that’s impervious to bullets and vicious enough the haul off an entire hunting party.

She said to run. Apparently, I haven’t been running fast enough.

My breath hitches up my throat in panicked little hiccups as I flick my laptop open and start scrolling through news reports. Missing campers. Bloody campsites with no sign of human life. A dropped call to someone’s girlfriend that ended in screaming and then silence. And it all started four days ago. The day before I rolled into Minnesota. I feel like I might pass out, sinking back onto the creaky bed and staring disbelievingly at the screen. The thing’s been a step ahead of me this entire time. She was bored. I’m the cure for that boredom. A toy. A mouse staring down the gaping maw of a tiger. She said to run, but I was stupid to think that I ever had a chance of actually getting away.

And really, it’s almost a relief, except for the part of me that’s scared shitless of being ripped limb from limb. What kind of life is this, hiding out in gross motel rooms and changing my name every other day, constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering when the inevitable doom is finally going to catch up to me? And who’d have thought the end of the line would be middle-of-fucking-nowhere Minnesota? That’s just anticlimactic. If I had it left in me, I might laugh. All that’s left to do is sit here and wait for the end, I guess, wait to be the next violently mutilated body on the shitty local news. I wonder how they’ll justify a bear attack in a motel room.

_No._

I don’t know where the courage comes from. I sure as hell haven’t had any for the past month, jumping three feet in the air anytime someone tries to talk to me and dropping at least ten pounds from the stress. But out of nowhere, something hot and violent bubbles against the linings of my veins, a seething anger that rockets down my limbs and makes my grip tense until the worn-out duvet is a rumpled mess beneath my hands. I’ve been running. I’ve been running and hiding and I have lost _everything,_ so I’ll be damned if I just sit here like an animal in a trap. There’s no delusion about the fact that I’m going down, but I’d rather go down with guns blazing than be some meek little victim. I remember what it was like to see the light leave my family's eyes. I remember hearing my father drowning in his own blood. I remember making the impossible decision to put a bullet in my own mother’s head. And I won’t ever forget.

I grab my phone and my duffel bag off the table, leaving the room in a mess and the key on the bedspread. I won’t be coming back. The .22 pokes at my hip through the canvas as I walk, stopping at the corner gas station to ask directions to Itasca State Park, and for the first time in weeks, I manage to feel something other than afraid. Fear’s a paralytic. Fury is a catalyst.

And if this bitch wants my blood, she’s going to have to bleed a little herself to get it.


	2. Chapter 1 - Ryan

 

When you grow up the way I did, you learn to take what you’ve got and make it into what you need. What do I need? Preferably an entire suit of Kevlar and a military-grade flamethrower. What have I got? A leather jacket, a can of compressed air I shoplifted from Staples, and a Zippo. It’ll do in a pinch.

The inside of the ranger station is musty and claustrophobic, the wheezing efforts of the broken space heater on the front desk doing nothing to help the rundown ambiance of the place. I’ve never been good with this part. Acting’s not my strong suit, and I already feel about a thousand miles out-of-place in Minnesota anyway. But really, I manage to feel a thousand miles out-of-place anywhere I set foot, so I guess I’ve gotten used to it by now. I’m too restless to stay in one place, so I shuffle around the room and stare at the maps on the walls, my mind racing ahead of me to pinpoint the locations of each batch of missing campers over the past four days. Sixty-mile radius. That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover on foot. I reach up and trace a finger over the little icon indicating the station I’m standing in, sweeping it upwards towards the problem area. My best bet is to extend the search another twenty miles in each direction if I want to catch this thing before the next family camping trip turns into an all-you-can-eat buffet. Well, this is going to suck.

“Hey, sorry about that.” A frazzled-looking guy in a ranger’s uniform walks out of the back room, looking like he’s gone a week without sleeping. Tall, dark-eyed, broad-shouldered, the kind of guy you could look at and tell that he does work in the outdoors. And despite looking like he’s running on adrenaline fumes and half a pot of coffee, he doesn’t look suspicious, which is good for me. He shuts the door to the office behind him and extends his hand with a weary smile. “You’re the guy from the National Park Service, right?”

“Yeah, hi. Ryan Cromley,” I shake his hand and lie smoothly, issuing a silent thank-you to my brain for remembering the right fake surname on the Park Service ID in my wallet. Printed it at Kinkos last night, not my best work, but Ranger Rick here looks so out of it that I could probably show him my membership to the Mickey Mouse Club and he’d let me take over the case. “Sorry for the short notice, Ranger... Saporta, right? I think we spoke on the phone yesterday.”

“Gabe,” he nods, stepping back and running a hand through his hair. “Not that we don’t appreciate the help, but I gotta wonder what a guy from the National Park Service is doing working on a State Park issue.”

“I’m an interested party,” I shrug, trying to smile and play it off. The fewer questions, the better.

Gabe looks at me funny for a few seconds. “You’re not from Minnesota, are you?”

“Is the accent that bad?” I fake a laugh, nervousness starting to prickle across the back of my neck. Shit, give me guns and blood and fighting any day, just don’t make me deal with people. “But you’re right. Alabama, born and bred.”

That much is the truth. Despite spending most of my life on the move, more a child of the highway than of any one place in particular, Alabama still clings to my vocal cords in a way that I’ve never really noticed myself. Everyone else seems to pick up on it, though. Sure, I can hear that Gabe’s got a little bit of that rounded Minnesota tone in his voice, but to him I probably sound like I just walked straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard. My damn drawl was the reason I couldn’t go undercover as a State Park worker in the first place. No way I’m ever going to be able to sound like I live in Minnesota, although I’ve been told that my Scottish accent is great when I’m piss-drunk. Irrelevant. Focus, Ross, you don’t have to win an Oscar, just convince the guy that you’re legit.

“I got family up around here, though.” And _that’s_ the biggest whopper I’ve told all day. Don’t have any family alive at all, and none of them ever stepped foot in Minnesota. Still, Gabe looks like he’s buying it, so I spin the web a little further. “My niece is one of those extreme-sport types, loves kayaking and hiking. She’s a little too brave for her own good, y’know? Probably wouldn’t think twice about runnin’ around out here with a bear on the loose. Suffice to say I’m personally invested in making sure that the next time I come to Minnesota isn’t to attend a funeral.”

“Fair enough.” I didn’t think Gabe would take that much convincing, and I guess I was right. The people up here are run ragged trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, and they’ll take any help they can get. Poor sons of bitches have no idea what’s _really_ running around in their forests, and I aim to keep it that way. They want to think it’s a bear? Fine. That’s way easier than coming to terms with the truth.

“I’ve been looking over the maps, and I’ve got some hunches about your danger zone,” I say, pointing at an area of the map that’s hell and gone from my search radius. “My bet is that Yogi’s gonna start haulin’ ass towards the lake now that you’ve got rangers in the woods. I’d get your guys down there, try to flush him into the open.”

Ranger Gabe frowns a little confusedly, but eventually nods. “It’s a bear that’s not hibernating yet. Yeah, it’ll need a water source nearby before it beds down. You’re talking like you’re not going to be there. What’s your plan?”

“All I need you to take care of is getting your guys to the lake and making sure I have clearance to do a little prowling of my own,” I grin reassuringly, clapping him on the back. “I got a feeling that our furry friend won’t be causing any more trouble.”

* * *

I fucking hate the great outdoors.

It’s not that I have a problem with nature. Hell, I might enjoy a nice camping trip if I wasn’t acutely aware of the hundreds of different things that can creep up on you and devour you in the night. It’s not so much an issue of me not liking nature as it is of nature not liking me. Since leaving the ranger station, I’ve tripped over roots and busted my ass three times, banged my head on five low-hanging branches, and been on the wrong end of a fight with a very irritated squirrel. All told, I’m not exactly making the stealthy approach I had in mind, which might be okay if I were actually hunting a bear. At least I’d have a shot at running away from a bear. There’s no running from a goddamn Wendigo.

I haven’t heard of an active one in a few years, haven’t seen one up close and personal since I was about fifteen. Most people’s idea of father-son bonding is something along the lines of a baseball game or working together on a car. The Ross brand of bonding was something a little more dangerous. When your family’s been in the business of hunting down all sorts of paranormal nasties for four generations, you tend to forget how to do anything else. Going after that Wendigo was the first time Dad ever let me call the shots on a hunt, and we both almost got killed for it. Needless to say, I’m not wild about tracking this one down, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else on the job and if I don’t take it out now, it’ll just be another hibernation cycle, years of nothing followed by sprees of brutal, bloody murders. I tell myself that there’s nothing to worry about. I was a stupid kid last time, and I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. There’s a big difference between fifteen and twenty-four. I actually took the time to sit down and formulate a plan for this one. Get the rangers out of the area, find where it’s living, lure it out, light it up. Easy enough.

Despite the pattern of attacks when you look at them on a map, I know better than to think it’s hunting from a central location. The midpoint for all those bloody campsites is a riverbank, and there’s no Wendigo that’s going to be living that far from a hidey-hole. They need caves, outcroppings, something dark and inherently creepy, which means I’m headed North, right by the scene of the newest disaster.

The campsite is still roped off by police tape and warning signs, but I duck under the former and ignore the latter, searching around for evidence that’s probably been trampled over by dumbass cops. Tent ripped to shreds, blood-spattered sleeping bags, yada yada. It’s all a very dramatic setting for a breaking news report, but it’s irrelevant to helping me find the thing that did it. I have to circle around the area a few times before I can spot it, just the slightest indentation on the ground, a certain pattern to the dried blood clinging to the grass. The signs of a body being dragged off.

That’s the nasty part about Wendigos. Well, nastier, at any rate, apart from the whole insatiable hunger for human flesh and super-charged hunting abilities thing. But the fact that they like to keep their food alive until they eat it is beyond shudder-inducing, although it might allow a certain sort of hope to live in a person who isn’t nearly as cynical as I am. Yeah, those poor bastards might be alive in a cave somewhere nearby, but I’m not counting on it, and it’s not something I want to worry about when the main task at hand is killing this thing and making it out with my own hide intact. Frowning, I duck back under the yellow tape and start following the trail, squinting down at the trampled underbrush beneath my feet and mumbling to myself. “All right, where’d you take ‘em?”

The further I move into the woods, the more I get the feeling of being watched. It’s almost nothing at first, a slight tickle at the back of my neck, a little tension humming in the air. Only when I dwell on it does it start to feel sinister, something that makes my pulse pick up tempo. Hunters have a sixth sense about this stuff. Some develop it, I was born with it, but either way, everyone knows that ignoring it is a great way to end up dead. I stop mid-step, a hand drifting slowly down to take the compressed air and lighter out of my jacket pocket. There’s a handgun shoved into the back of my waistband, but like hell I’m touching it with a Wendigo creeping around. My sole hope of survival lies in a few drops of lighter fluid and a can of the shit you use to clean dust out of your keyboard. Ain’t life grand?

The foliage to my left rustles, and my head snaps to the side, a stab of instinctual panic shooting straight down my spinal column. But then my training takes precedence over my instinct, and I raise the can and lighter in the direction of the noise. One step forwards. Two. A hand closing around one side of the underbrush. A sharp jerk to one side. “Gotcha, you - the fuck?”

Instead of finding a ravenous monster out for my blood, I’m looking at a very scared, very confused-looking kid. Dark hair, wide, frightened brown eyes, features a bit too big for his face. He’s about college-age, jeans and worn t-shirt, duffle bag on his shoulder, inherent look of distrust. _Runaway,_ my brain chimes in almost immediately. The one thing that’s off about that image is the Ruger 10/22 he’s got pointed at me, a shaking finger poised over the trigger.

“Woah, woah, cool it, I ain’t gonna hurt you!” I rush out, backing off a few steps and putting my hands in the air. I’ve seen what a gun can do in the hands of someone who’s scared and/or desperate, and I’ve got no desire to get shot today. A second passes, then two, and the kid finally lowers the gun even though he’s fixing me with a wary look that clearly says he’ll still put a bullet in me if I make any sudden moves. Blinking in confusion, I give him a quick once over before scowling at him and lowering my hands. “What the hell are you doin’ out here, kid? They evacuated the park yesterday.”

“Hence me _hiding,_ ” he snaps, rolling his eyes. “And I’m not a kid. What are _you_ doing out here?”

I pointedly avoid the question, matching him glare for glare. “You’re gonna get yourself killed. Ain’t you heard there’s a bear on the loose?”

“It’s not a bear.”

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. And here I thought there was no one else on the case. I eye him skeptically, not sure how to ask if we’re on the same page here. “Oh? Then what is it?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says gravely, and the irony of it makes me snort. I’ve been the one saying those words more times than I can count, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on the receiving end of them.

“You’d be surprised at the things I’d believe,” I tell him, backing up a few more steps until he apparently judges me a safe enough distance away to come out of his hiding spot. “And a word to the wise: if you’re after the same thing I am, shootin’ it will only make it angry. I’d stow the gun; it won’t help you.”

The kid barks out a humorless laugh, rolls his eyes like he knows something I don’t. “And your ghetto-rigged flamethrower will?”

“I... yes. Didn’t you do your research before you decided to hunt this thing? Yes to fire, no to bullets. You gotta read up on this stuff. Flying blind on a hunt is a great way to end up dead.” Now that I’ve had the chance to look at him, something seems off. He doesn’t look like someone who makes a living off of killing things, doesn’t have that deadness behind his eyes that all hunters get after so many years. Sure, he doesn’t give off the air of an innocent - there’s a sort of something _haunted_ about him that I can’t put my finger on - but I still can't see him as a hunter. "How long have you been huntin' anyway, kid?"

"I'm _not_ a fucking kid!"

"Well, I don't exactly have anything else to call you. The question remains."

He looks at me incredulously, like he's mulling over whether or not I'm trustworthy. I'm not. There's a whole list of dead bodies that will tell you what a bad idea it is to trust me. But apparently all of my ghosts have better things to do than whisper their warnings in this kid's ear, because after a few more seconds of that penetrating stare he finally sighs and clicks the safety of his rifle. "Brendon. My name's Brendon. And I've been out here for about two days."

"No, I wasn't askin' how long you've been after the Wendigo, I want to know how long you've been in the life," I clarify with a barely-concealed roll of my eyes, trying to judge the Book of Brendon by his cover again. Definitely not any older than twenty-two, not younger than eighteen. His clothes look like the were washed in a laundromat two states back, and the way they're hanging loosely off him says that he hasn't had a decent meal in weeks. No sleep, either, the dark shade of his eyes made even darker by the bruise-like shadows hanging beneath them and a weary slump to his posture that screams of unacknowledged fatigue. I know what someone looks like when they're running from something. I've spent my whole life running. Looking at this kid, I might as well be looking in a mirror at myself six years ago. Lost. Confused. Suddenly and cripplingly alone. Most of my capacity for empathy was stomped out of me before I even hit puberty, but there's a tiny spot behind my sternum that twinges for him. I don't like it. It goes away when I will it to, though, fading beneath my decision that if he's going to be stupid enough to trust me then I might as well be stupid enough to trust him. Trying not to move too suddenly lest I end up with a gun in my face again, I step forward slightly and extend my hand in his direction. "Ryan Ross. Haven't heard of you yet, so I'm guessin' you're new to the life. It's a pretty tight-knit community, everybody all up in everyone else's shit. I keep my distance, but I ain't so far out of the loop that I wouldn't know someone."

Brendon shakes my hand, and there's a particular roughness to his fingers that mirrors my own. I almost smile. Another guitarist. The kid looks confused as hell, though, heavy brows furrowing together and full lips half-wrapped around words he can't seem to place. "Life? Wait, what community are you talking about? And what the hell is a Windy-go?"

Oh, fuck _me._ He's not new. He's _brand_ new, just-hopped-on-the-spooky-ass-bandwagon new, and he's running around in the woods after something he has no idea how to beat, a big furry nasty that's ripped God knows how many _experienced_ hunters to shreds, forget stupid little freshmen like this goon. My expression shifts from cool indifference to annoyance in a second flat, an irritated growl catching in my throat as I turn around and rake a hand through my hair in exasperation. Like this job wasn't hard enough. Now I've got to babysit.

"A _Wendigo_ is what's been killing the campers," I explain in my most patient voice, which still manages to sound like I'm one more dumbfounded look away from landing a right hook straight to his jaw. "Immortal, incredible hunter, huge claws, about fifteen feet tall, seen any walkin' around?"

"So... you're telling me that the thing that's been killing all those people is what, Bigfoot on steroids?" Brendon gapes at me like I've suggested something absolutely ludicrous, which by normal standards, I have. By hunter standards, though, this is like discussing the weather. Twenty percent chance of rain, and there's an evil ancient spirit-creature running around Minnesota with an acquired taste for camper kabobs. Cold front moving in, might get some thunderstorms later in the week.

"Mix Bigfoot on steroids with Predator and you're in the general ballpark of it, yeah." I've lost precious time, time that could have been spent following a trail that's growing colder by the second, and it's all thanks to some dumbass who couldn't be bothered to research his fucking lore. "The patterns fit. Bloody disappearances in this general area every fifty years or so, no bodies, and we're in the right part of the country for it. Which you would _know_ if you'd bothered to do a little homework before hiking out into the woods with a gun that's not gonna do you any good. You even got silver bullets in that thing? Hell, kid, what'd you think you were chasin' down out here?"

"I... I thought..." Brendon suddenly looks so much smaller, the snark and confusion melting from his face until all that's left is a bone-deep sadness, a sense of hollowing loss. "I've been running. From this, um, this thing, for a month now. It... My whole family, they... And I thought it was here. I was tired of running."

Unless you're born into it like I was, everyone's entrance into the life is heralded by death and sob stories. I've heard it all, children stolen by changelings, wives killed by demons, vampires decimating entire towns. I've heard about others' losses, but I've never seen it so fresh, so raw, and the part of me (which is to say, the majority of me) that's never been good at dealing with emotions practically recoils in an effort to not let that loss touch me, to not let it grow roots under my skin and spread until I'm attached to it in a way I can't afford to be. That list of dead bodies that can tell you what a bad idea it is to trust me? They'll say the same thing about letting me get invested. I could never fathom how some people were so good at gardening, how my mother could plant a seed and bring life out of the cold ground. Understanding the concept of nurturing is hard when everything you touch has a persistent habit of dying.

“That’s, uh... that’s rough,” I offer in my own brand of awkward condolence, digging a beat-up pack of Marbs out of my jacket pocket and lighting up just so I have something to do with my hands. The things I don’t know in life always seem to outweigh the things I do. I know what it takes to kill a werewolf, to free a trapped spirit, to send a demon screeching back to the Abyss. I know how a Shapeshifter’s breath shudders and wheezes as it dies, how Vampire blood feels thicker and stickier than the human variety as it coats your skin. But I don’t know how to apologize or smile at the right time or engage in small talk, how to work my way around the complicated maze of social acceptability that’s never made sense to me. What kind of person does that make me, that killing things is preferable to the intricacies of a conversation?

It makes me a jaded asshole with a talent for destruction. That’s what it makes me. And I’ve been at it too long for the fact to make me feel anything other than a cavernous indifference.

“So, you... you know about this stuff. This paranormal, supernatural... stuff.” Brendon looks tenuous, the beginnings of an idea hovering on the tip of his tongue and fuck no, we’re not going down that route, Ross, not again. The last time I let myself get involved in a personal case, I lost the one thing I had left. I’d spent my whole life swearing that if I could just keep my distance, stop caring, then maybe I wouldn’t leave a trail ashes and the scorched remains of my loved ones’ lives in my wake. You can’t lose what you don’t have. Caring isn’t the advantage and when you grow up as a hunter that’s the first thing you learn, but there are always those people who pull you into their gravity until you’re a helpless moon, everything revolving around a selfish love that you perpetuate even though you know it’ll only hurt you both in the end. I remember how it felt to lose that one last tie I had to the normal world, the last hope I had at a pipe dream of picket fences and some form of stability. I may have been fighting my whole life to keep from caring, but that was the final blow that cemented my decision to stay the fuck away from matters of the heart, because they’re way too dangerous when I get my hands on them. I’m not getting sucked back into someone’s personal issues. It always gets ugly when I do, and I’m so lost in my resolve that I don’t even realize how hard my teeth are clenched until my jaw groans in protest. No. We’re not going there. Never again. Never. Fucking. Again.

“I don’t hunt on commission. I go where I’m needed. I’m not hoppin’ in on your little revenge agenda, kid. I got bigger fish to fry,” I snap sharply around a deep drag on the paper cylinder between my fingers, letting the taste of stale regret and impending cancer scrape roughly across my tongue.

“I wasn’t asking you to!” Brendon lashes back with just as much venom, fists clenching white-knuckled at his sides. “And if you call me ‘kid’ one more time I swear to God I’m going to punch you in the throat.”

“I’d _love_ to see you try,” I reply smoothly, an icy, challenging grin stretching slowly at my lips. Sure, tangling with supernatural beasties has its own techniques and nuances, but the last good old-fashioned bar fight I got in was seven states and two months ago. Maybe it’s just that penchant for wreckage that lives somewhere under my skin talking, but there’s something about the ache of fresh bruises and feeling someone’s bones shudder under your knuckles that carries a sort of nirvana within it. Pipsqueak wants to go, we’ll go, and the Wendigo can wait. I can see him considering it - the best part about being stick-skinny and generally unintimidating is that people don’t expect you to kick their ass until they’re on the floor bleeding from at least two orifices and wondering what the fuck just happened - but he must think better of it, because after a beat in time he turns away angrily, adjusting the strap of his bag on his shoulder.

There’s still a pulse of tension ticking visibly in the tension of Brendon’s jawline, but when he speaks again his voice is calm, almost pedantic, like a grown-up trying to explain themselves to a fussy toddler. “I was just wondering if there’s some sort of... I don’t know, some way I could learn to fight back.”

“Yeah, I’ll get you an application for Hunter’s University.”

“You know what, I don’t need you being an asshole to me for no apparent reason, okay? Your condescension isn’t accomplishing anything for either of us.”

“I don’t know about that. I’m havin’ fun with it,” I smirk, and that’s all it takes to break the last fragile strand of Brendon’s patience. With a strangled cry of outrage he turns on his heel and stomps off into the undergrowth, trampling his stupid feet all over my precious trail. Cursing under my breath, I lunge forward and grab him by the shoulder, yanking him back before he can mess it up any further. “Look. You want to be a hunter, I ain’t gonna stop you. It’s a shitty life and there’re no happy endings and there’s a ninety-nine percent chance that you’re gonna die young and unpleasantly, but if that’s what you want, go for it. But don’t come right outta the gate and think you can take on something like a Wendigo. That’s beyond stupid, it’s _suicide,_ kid - Brendon. You want to hunt down the thing you’re really after? Go find yourself a mentor who’ll teach you the ropes until you’ve learned enough to not get yourself killed. And for now, the best thing you can do for yourself is clear outta these woods and let the big boys take care of Killer Sasquatch, okay?”

“And I’m supposed to believe that _you’re_ the ‘big boys?’” he laughs coldly, jerking away from my grip and fixing me with a patronizing look. “You can’t be that much older than me. How long have you been at it?”

“I took care of my first poltergeist when I was six. Shot down a Skinwalker at ten, took out my first Wendigo when I was fifteen,” I hiss venomously, back to thinking about how nice it would be to punch that smirk right off of Brendon’s pretty little face. “I was born in this life. I was learnin’ how to melt silver into bullets and exorcise demons while you were learnin’ to tie your shoes. You had nightmares about the boogeyman. I learned how to kill his ass. So yeah. I _am_ the fuckin’ big boys, and you got ten seconds to vacate before I make you. Trust me, it won’t be pleasant.”

I don’t realize how far I’ve moved into his personal space until my boot bumps against the toe of his worn-out high top, our breaths mingling across the few inches of height I’ve got on him. Up close, you can see the little details, the thickness of his eyelashes, the beginnings of a sunburn starting along his cheekbones, lips chapped from autumn days and eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights. He blinks once, twice, actually looking a little frightened before that infuriating sense of superiority is back, a hand pressing into my ribs and shoving me backwards. “I think I want to stay. I learn better through experience, and I’ve decided that I want to make your job as miserable as possible, Ryan Ross. The only way you’re going to make sure that Windy-whatsit doesn’t eat me is if you drag me along.”

“I’m startin’ to not care if you end up as Wendigo chow,” I mutter darkly, but I don’t waste the time or energy it would take to beat him up and haul him out of the woods. The kid’s got me in a pretty effective checkmate, after all. He won’t leave of his own volition, and if I leave him, he’s just the next thing on the buffet. Besides, the noise of a fight would probably be an effective dinner bell, bring the thing running to snack on both of us while we were too busy trying to mangle each other to notice. Grumbling under my breath, I shove Brendon out of the way and go back to making my slow progress along the fading trail. I don’t tell him he can stay, but he seems to take me not beating the shit out of him as some form of approval, trotting along happily beside me like some sort of annoying puppy. “Why the hell do you want to come hunt this thing down, anyway? It hasn’t done nothin’ to you.”

“It hasn’t done anything to you, either,” Brendon points out, and yeah, he’s kind of got me there. “But it killed all those campers, so it’s obviously not a global force for good. And I guess it’s got that sort of car-crash interest for me now. Fucking terrifying, and I want to look away, but I can’t.”

“Yeah, sounds like something a hunter would say,” I sigh wearily, crouching down to examine a blood spatter in the grass to no avail in the weakening light. “We’re pretty close to the area with caves where it might be living, but it’s too dark for me to follow the trail much longer. We need to go ahead and make camp, get settled in. They’re dangerous predators during the day, but they’re unstoppable at night.”

“And what, some sleeping bags and a middle-school pyromaniac boy’s party trick is going to protect us from this huge, carnivorous... thing?” he asks, more than a little panic underlying the tones of his voice. Snorting, I shrug the old canvas backpack I’ve been carrying off my shoulders, rooting around in there until I come up with a can of bright-orange spray paint that I hold up to Brendon like it’s the answer to all our problems.

“No, graffiti is. Now go make yourself useful and go pick up some firewood. It’s gonna be a long night.”

* * *

“That was amazing,” Brendon says hours later, literally licking bread crumbs from his fingertips. The shadows cast by the fire throw his face into sharp relief, making his features look more severe, the bones more prominent. I pulled half of a BLT I salvaged from the diner I ate lunch at today out of my backpack and I thought he was going to cry. Before I could stop myself, I handed it over, watching as he held the thing like a fucking holy relic before practically inhaling it. It wasn’t even that good of a sandwich, but you’d have thought I’d just served him a filet mignon or something. Yeah, poor kid definitely hadn’t been eating well. He admitted as much when I asked him about it, said he’d been conserving the cash he had and living on granola bars and bus station vending machine snacks for the past month.

That sandwich was our version of smoking the peace pipe, I guess. Either from gratitude or from lack of hunger-induced crankiness, Brendon suddenly became far more amiable, and if giving him food is all I have to do to spare myself his attitude, I’ll go hiking through this forest until I find him another goddamn BLT. He’s almost bearable now - a little hyper and twitchy, asks a few too many questions, but almost bearable - and I guess I have to be thankful for the little things. We’ve spent the last couple hours shooting the shit and trying to distract ourselves from the horror that’s lurking out in the dark, and he’s a good enough conversationalist that it nearly makes up for my complete social ineptitude. He talks about growing up in Vegas, about how his oldest brother used to sneak him into the casino where he worked as a blackjack dealer and the old guy that had been the bartender there for years taught him how to do card tricks. He talks about the music he likes and smiles when I nod in agreement to a few of the artists he rattles off. He talks about all the nerdy shit he was into in high school while I smoke my way through half my pack of cigarettes and eventually admit to liking Star Trek a lot when I was a kid. He asks me to talk about myself. I say I’m from Alabama and leave it at that. He doesn’t press the issue, and I’m quietly grateful for it.

"So what are these again?" he asks, brushing his fingers over the dried swirls of paint I sprayed onto the grass before it got dark.

"Anasazi symbols. They got some kinda mojo in 'em that's like Off for Wendigos. It won't be able to get inside the circle, but you can bet it's out there somewhere waitin' for one of us to put a toe out of it." The forest is eerily quiet, even absent of the ambient sounds of nature. Not a leaf rustling, not a cricket chirping. It's an environment designed to make prey jumpy. Yeah, well I hate to tell Big Ugly, but I've seen things that have made me jump a lot more than it can. Bring it.

Brendon, however, looks well and truly spooked. "So you think it's out there watching us?"

"I know it is. Can't you feel it?" Sometimes I take my instincts for granted, forget that not everyone has the visceral intuition to know when someone or something is watching them. It's hard for me to understand how Brendon _doesn't_ feel it, that heavy, malicious intent swirling in the darkness outside the fire's glow. I don't have to see the eyes to know that it's watching me, don't have to hear it shuffling around in the underbrush to know it's there. This is where it begins, a standoff of wills to see which will cave first, the monster outside the circle or the one inside it. A smirk tugs at the corners of my lips. I've never lost. Game on, beastie. "But it's not gonna come out because it's a _scared little bitch -_ "

"Shhh! Stop it!" Brendon hisses as he jumps to his feet, smacking my arm and looking like he's one sudden noise away from pissing himself. His eyes are bottomless in the light of the fire, wide and dark as they flick around in an effort to see something that doesn't want to be seen. A few more moments of tense silence pass before he turns back toward me, gnawing on his lower lip and picking his rifle up from where it's been leaning against a tree. He sits down next to me and starts toying with it, popping out the magazine, unloading, reloading, checking the sights. That thing will do him about as much good as throwing a pebble at Godzilla, but I'm not going to take away his proverbial security blanket. I don't want to find out just how annoying he'll get without it. I can feel the weight of the odd look he fixes me with after he stops messing with the old Ruger, something caught between fear and fascination playing its way out across the stark planes of his face. "So this Wendigo. What is it, exactly? And why is it eating the campers?"

"There's lore on the Wendigo in almost every Native American culture. The pronunciation varies, sometimes it's Witiko or Wee-Tee-Go, but the word 'Wendigo' is Cree Indian, loosely translates to 'evil that devours,'" I explain, trying to remember everything on the subject I've got in my journal without having to dig around in my backpack for it. Brendon looks at me like he's not sure whether or not he should be taking notes. Professor Ross, now that's a joke if I ever heard one. "They were men, once. But then for whatever reason, they turned to cannibalism, got a taste for human flesh. Once they ate enough of it, they became Wendigos. Immortal, almost invincible, and always hungry. They're the world's perfect predator - the ferocity of an animal with the brains of a man."

Brendon's face has gone startlingly pale, fingers drumming nervously along the rifle's barrel as he looks out into the endless dark. "So we're up against the love-child of Hannibal Lecter and the Hulk. Awesome. And you said that fire's the only thing that can kill them?"

"They're highly flammable, yeah. Silver'll slow 'em down though, which is why I brought this." I reach back and pull the handgun out of my waistband, perhaps a bit too fast judging by how Brendon twitches before apparently coming to the conclusion that as irritating as he is, I’m not going to waste a bullet on him. It’s admittedly a pretty wicked-looking piece, though, a custom semi-auto Beretta 92FS that Dad got me for my eighteenth birthday. Military-grade, not exactly something you’d see a thug pointing out a car window in some back alley. More along the lines of something you’d see a Marine pull out of his belt two seconds before he puts a round in your skull. Raising an eyebrow in Brendon’s direction, I pull the slide back and pop out the magazine, shaking a few gleaming bullets onto my palm and holding them out for his inspection. “Sterling silver. I melt and mold ‘em myself when I got time, buy ‘em off other hunters when I don’t. They’ll kill a Werewolf or Shapeshifter or Skinwalker stone dead, and they’ll put a pretty decent hurtin’ on our carnivorous friend should we run into him. I’d offer you some, but good luck with nine milimeter rounds in your twenty-two.”

He laughs as I reload the magazine and slot it back into the gun, a tittering, half-deranged sound. It’s the laugh of someone who has the option to either laugh or have a mental breakdown. “The whole ‘silver bullets kill a Werewolf’ thing is true?”

“Most legends are rooted in truth. You’ll find that out the longer you’re in the life,” I nod, clicking the safety and sliding the gun back into my jeans. “But yeah, most of the paranormal nasties out there are averse to silver, iron, salt, or some combination of the three. I knew a guy once that could list off a hundred ways to kill spooky shit with stuff you can find in your kitchen.”

“ _Knew?_ As in past tense?”

I chuckle darkly, watching the fire eat away at the fragile skeleton of branches we built it from. “Yeah. He got disemboweled by a Rugaru. In his kitchen.”

Brendon looks at me like I’m absolutely insane for laughing, and it takes me a minute to figure out that finding ironic humor in the story of someone getting gutted might not be socially acceptable. We settle into an awkward silence after that, broken only by the occasional pop of a stick cracking under the fire’s onslaught and the eerie hum of the chilling wind as it whistles through the trees. Minnesota in late October is fucking cold as it is, but thank all that’s holy the big blizzards haven’t hit this area yet. Tracking down a Wendigo in ten feet of snow doesn’t sound like my idea of fun.

“Why did it take the campers, though?” Out of the silence, Brendon speaks so suddenly that I jump a little, a hand going instinctively to my gun until I catch the shit-eating smirk on his face that very clearly says that he saw that he startled me. I glower at him. He smirks wider. It’s only a small moment in time, that levity, gone as quickly as it came in the wake of Brendon looking curiously out into the darkness. “I mean, it tore that one guy apart, but all the other people are still missing. Why not just leave the bodies at the campsites?”

“That one guy was a snack,” I reply gravely, picking up a nearby branch and stoking the fire until it glows a bit more brightly. Not much comfort, but it’ll have to do. “Wendigos like to eat their meat fresh. They run on hibernation cycles that last decades. Sleep for years, wake up, hunt down a bunch of people, take them back to wherever they live. They’ll eat off the live supply for anywhere from a few months to a year, and then they go back to sleep.”

The look of horror on Brendon’s face is palpable. “So those people could still be alive. Christ, they must be terrified.”

“I’m not countin’ on it. If this thing’s hungry enough to gnaw on a guy right at the campsite, it’s got a hefty appetite. They’re all probably long gone. But if you wanna be optimistic, I guess they could -”

 _“Help me!”_ The voice rises out of the darkness like a wailing siren, ragged, terrified and distinctly feminine.

“Holy shit,” Brendon whispers, eyes the size of dinner plates. “D’you think one of them escaped?”

I shake my head quickly, a sharp spike of adrenaline pounding through my veins. “No way. I’ve heard stuff before about Wendigos being able to mimic human voices to lure people. There’s no way in hell someone got away. It can’t be-”

_“Someone help me, please!”_

“Does that fucking _sound_ like it’s coming from a fifteen-foot-tall monster?” Already on his feet, Brendon’s hovering inches away from the painted circle, squinting out into the night with abject terror etched into his features. “Oh my God, didn’t the news say that one of those campers was a seventeen-year-old girl?”

I grab him by the back of the shirt and haul him in closer to the fire, away from the borders of danger and the increasingly panicked-sounding cries in the darkness. My stomach churns with every one of them, with the thought of some poor kid out there running from a monster, but my head inevitably wins out over my heart every time, hurried rationalization hissed into Brendon’s ear. “Uh-huh, and where’s the logic in believing that some teeny bopper could weasel her way out of a Wendigo nest?”

“Are you really willing to bet some girl’s life on the possibility that you’re right?” he asks, looking appalled.

“I’m not willing to bet _my_ life on the possibility that I’m wrong.”

“Ryan!”

“Brendon!” I mimic his self-righteous tone perfectly, yanking the rifle sharply out of his hands and glaring down at him. “If that’s really a girl out there and she’s got a Wendigo on her tail in the woods at night, there ain’t a damn thing we can do to help her. First rule of being a hunter, kid - people die. All the fuckin’ time.”

His face hardens at that, a flash of pure steel in his eyes as he makes a grab for the rifle and I jerk it away from him yet again. I’ve seen a whole kaleidoscope of his expressions tonight - angry, sad, laughing, snarky, upjumped - but the practically visible waves of determination rolling off of him are new. It makes him seem bigger, somehow, like his wiry little frame can’t hold all that stubbornness so it expanded to fit. Spine straighter, shoulders broader, jawline set in defiance. If I weren’t ready to throttle him, I might be able to see a sort of beauty in it. He looks at me like I’m something slimy that crawled out for under a rock, though, superiority dripping from every barbed syllable he spits at me. “I’ve listened to enough people dying. I don’t want to do it again.”

There’s a flash of red across my vision, a nameless fury howling at me to kick his ignorant ass into oblivion. In between punches and the satisfying crunch of bone I would scream about how _dare_ he think he’s the only person in the world who’s lost someone, who’s seen their family die. With sticky red from a broken nose and split lips drying across my knuckles I would shout about how him acting like a victim is an insult, how I watched the one person I had left go to a fate _worse_ than death and it never for one second made me think that I had some sort of moral high ground over anyone, how he’s delusional if he thinks saving one person he doesn’t even know will make that loss go away because it doesn’t, I’ve saved a hundred people and a hundred more and it _never_ fills the void. In the midst of that corrosive rage, I come to the conclusion that Brendon’s a fucking idiot. A pompous, misguided, class-A _fucking_ idiot.

My fists are clenched so tightly that the chewed stubs of my nails carve violent little half-moons into my palms. Brendon’s looking at me like I’m a ticking time bomb (kid, you don’t know the half of it, I’ve got kerosene in my veins and you just lit a match), taking a few steps back and shooting a fleeting glance into the trees.

_“Please, someone, anyone!”_

I didn’t dig that far into the news reports, never talked to the families. If it really is that high school girl, running wide-eyed and terrified through the bracken, I wonder what she looks like. My mind’s got a habit of always letting my ghosts come back to play, and my imagination kicks into a hateful image, a would-be vision of pale skin scraped by whipping branches, twigs and leaves tangled in short blonde hair, big brown doe-eyes I know too well, pupils blown with terror. Another scream tears out of the night and it’s too garbled to make out, but in that moment I swear to God it sounds like _Ryan, please._

“Fuck _me,_ I’m gonna regret this,” I whisper to myself, grabbing the homemade flamethrower out of my backpack and pulling my gun back out before turning to Brendon with an absolutely vicious glare. “You stay in this circle, got it? I don’t care what you hear. You _stay in this goddamn circle._ ”

I’m off and running before he has a chance to protest, the carpet of dead leaves and fallen twigs crunching under my boots as I head in the direction of the screams. With all the rocky outcroppings around to bounce the echoes back, it could be coming from anywhere, a realization that makes cold dread sink into my bones. Another blood-curdling shriek splits the dark, sending daggers down my spine, and I curse myself for what’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever had before yelling, “This way! Head over here!”

Silence. Sudden, eerie silence. Immediately even further on edge than I was, I click the safety off on my gun, squinting through the inky darkness and berating myself for not bringing a flashlight. There was screaming, and then there was nothing. Not a whimper, not the sound of someone being ripped to shreds.

This is what a trap sounds like. Screaming, and then silence.

Another shout comes from the trees further off to my left, and I’m so startled by it that I accidentally jump and fire a round into the bushes, the sound of the gunshot as good as any beacon. And I know I’m in trouble now. Because that second scream, the one I just heard? It was a man’s scream, not a girl’s. In fact, the voice sounds kind of familiar.

_“Help! Oh God, it’s gainin’ on me, help!”_

Sounds kind of like me.

“Fuck!” I hiss, whirling around in a helpless circle and kicking myself mentally for ever being so damn stupid. Of course a Wendigo isn’t going to go after someone who knows how to kill it. And if it’s been listening to the conversation of the only other two higher-thinking beings in the woods right now, it’ll know that the best bet to get its next meal is to aim for the more vulnerable one, isolate the prey from its only source of protection. A sick, sinking feeling pervades my stomach like liquid lead as I try to picture what this must sound like back at camp. My screams. A gunshot. My pleas for help. Coming from different sources, but far enough away that an untrained ear couldn’t tell the difference. I’m sprinting back through the trees in a second flat, trying to follow my own careless, sporadic trail in the dark. “Brendon?!”

 _“Brendon!”_ the mockery of my disembodied voice replies, further away now, off in the uncharted darkness that I know I won’t be able to navigate fast enough.

“Brendon, don’t listen to it, that’s the Wendigo!” I wheeze-yell, stumbling over roots and trying to trace our fire’s glow through the panic and undergrowth. “Stay in the circle, okay, I’m fine!”

Two seconds later, I come crashing through the trees, over the lines of the circle and into camp. Into a silent, empty camp. The fire is burning low, the stub of my last cigarette tilted in the dirt, and Brendon’s bag and rifle are gone.

Well, shit. This just got ugly.

“You _moron!_ ” I shout out into the silently observant wild, only taking a second to catch my breath before running off again. It’s impossible to follow his trail in the dark. I’m literally running blind, crashing through the woods with no idea of the direction I should take. I stagger to a halt, trying to listen for him rustling around somewhere out there, and I finally hear it.

A panicked scuffle in the distance to my right, a sharp snap, a strangled _“Ryan!”_

“If that Wendigo doesn’t kill you, I will,” I grumble, setting off in the direction of the noise. “I’m coming, is it after you?”

_“It’s after me!”_

Spitting out a fountain of profanity that would have made my old man proud, I book it towards Brendon’s yells, closer and closer to the source of the noise until I run into a clearing of towering fir trees, slowing to a confused stop and staring around at the undisturbed blanket of dead pine needles coating the ground. No one’s been running through here, and there definitely hasn’t been a scuffle. “Brendon?”

Silence. Oh. _Oh,_ I’m stupid. Shaking my head at the sheer volume of dumbass it must have taken for me to not pick up on it, I look out into the shadows surrounding me. A self-effacing smirk settles on my face as I flick my Zippo on and hold the can of compressed air out in front of me. “You clever little fucker. All right, you got me where you want me, so come out and play. You wanna rumble, Ugly? We’ll rumble.”

And then a train hits me in the side.

That’s what it feels like, at least, a shapeless blur knocking into me so hard that my vision whites out for a second, robbing me of one of my senses. I can still hear, though, hear at least one of my ribs crack, hear the lighter and the aerosol can go skittering across the ground, hear the air whooshing out of my own lungs as I hit the ground hard enough that I skid back a good ten yards. When my eyes decide to work again, I’m looking up at a snarling, inhuman face, fangs and sallow skin and bright, wolfish yellow eyes, a hulking shape hovering above me with bloodstained claws silhouetted in the moonlight.

Yup. Wendigo. I was right.

The grip of my gun is digging painfully into my back where I must have dropped it or fallen on it or something in the fuzzy events of the last ten seconds. I’ve got one shot. One shot to hit it hard enough to get it off me, run for the lighter, and set the bastard ablaze. One shot. Maybe half a second. Time has slowed to a crawl. I scramble wildly for the gun, and as soon as it sees the flash of metal in my hand, the Wendigo lunges forward, batting it out of my grip like a child’s plaything. I manage to fire a single shot but it goes wide, right over the thing’s shoulder and out into the forest. In the next beat of time my hands are pinned to the ground, a single taloned claw slashing down my torso in the ensuing struggle, opening up a gash across my stomach and this is it, this is how I die.

I never really believed that shit about your life flashing before your eyes, but I guess that was just one more thing I was wrong about. In my final moments, it’s not the snarling monster about to end my life that I see. It’s my mother holding two-year-old me up to a birthday cake and helping me blow the candles out. It’s Dad showing me the right way to throw a football. It’s my first hunt, that sense of wonder as I watched the spirit fade into the ether. It’s a pretty girl with blonde hair and a smile like fire standing across from me in the living room of an abandoned house, a Smith and Wesson revolver trained between my eyes as she asks me what the hell I’m doing trying to steal her case. It’s that pretty girl’s lips on mine a year later under a highway overpass, the taste of honeysuckle and Carmex. It’s that pretty girl’s thumbs digging into the notches of my hips six months after that, her heartbeat thumping in my ears and the feeling that I was home for the first time in my life. It’s that pretty girl’s blood spattered down the front of my shirt five years after that, the ragged burn of sobs in my throat and the searing pain of having that last little piece of me ripped away. It’s a whole train of disconnected images and memories I didn’t know I had, a playground in Montana with a tire swing, a fistfight I got into three years ago and walked away with a broken jaw and bruised dignity, Mom yelling at me for hunting alone, Jon taking me for my first Starbucks, Dean laughing at some stupid TV show, Niagra Falls in July. Faster and faster, blurring together into a cataclysm of color and light that looks almost like a blaze of fire, and the Wendigo roars.

There’s a flash of heat that washes over my face, and I squint into the light just in time to see the monster crouched over me bursting into a cloud of ash, a petrified-looking Brendon standing behind it with my lighter and aerosol can in hand. “Holy fuck. A-are you okay?”

I gape blankly at him. “You just saved my life.”

“Shit, man, you’re bleeding, like a lot. I don’t know first aid, I don’t-”

“Brendon.” My voice has a weird, numb quality to it, a disconnection that’s probably my mind trying to adjust to the unlikely fact that I’m alive. “You just saved my life.”

“I ran after your voice, ended up in a cave. I saw... yeah, you were right about the campers. And then I heard you yell again so I ran and I saw the thing and I mean, I kinda just acted on impulse, but I guess it worked, yeah,” he stammers, looking in awe at the pile of ashes that had been a roaring monster a minute ago. “Dude. I just killed that thing.”

“Yeah. You did just kill that thing. Good timing.” And then for whatever stupid reason, we’re both laughing, loud and raucous and giddy, the sound of pure relief echoing out in the trees. After we stop I manage to get to my feet, achy and bloody but fucking _alive_ and holy hell, Ross, you wanna talk about making it out by the skin of your teeth. If it hadn’t been for Brendon showing up when he did, I’d be dead. The fact is simple enough to process, but the implication it carries is far heavier. He saved my life. He saved my life, and that means I owe him. I’ve always hated being indebted to people, but even my skewed moral code has a weird adherence to the principle of it, the idea that one good turn deserves another in the end. And here comes another ‘I’m gonna regret this’ moment. I can feel it in my bones. “So, now that you got a taste for it, you still thinkin’ about being a hunter?”

Brendon blinks down at the ramshackle flamethrower in his hands and back up at me, uncertain but just a little hopeful. “I want to find whatever it was that killed my family. And I want to kill it. You said there were mentors out there, right?”

“Yeah, but they’re all old geezers who’ll probably go all Mr. Miyagi on you and have you washin’ their cars for three years before you learn how to kill anything. Tell you what, kid. You saved my ass, so I owe you a solid.” I offer a rare smile, one that’s genuine and doesn’t even hold the slightest trace of a smirk. “How about you stick with me and I’ll show you the ropes. And we’ll find the creepy asshole that wrecked your life and gank it.”

“Are you serious?” I can’t tell if Brendon’s offended by or just disbelieving of the offer, his mouth hanging open as he stares at me across the clearing.

“Hey, despite me almost gettin’ killed a few minutes ago, I’m damn good at my job. And help is help. Take it or leave it.”

Slowly, a mile-wide smile stretches across his face, and it’s kind of like a sunrise, the first time I’ve seen him _really_ light up since I met him. “Yeah, okay. Sure! That’d be great! Um, where do we start?”

There’s a whole list of dead bodies that can tell you what a bad idea it is to trust me. The same list of dead bodies can tell you what a bad idea it is to let me get invested. Maybe it’s because he’s an idiot, or maybe it’s because I’m an idiot for encouraging him to, but for some idiotic reason, Brendon trusts me now. And for some even more idiotic reason, I’ve done it again. I’ve let myself slip, let that stupid goofy smile on his face plant a tiny hopeful seed somewhere in my chest, one that will grow roots around my ribcage and sprout flowers beneath my collarbones and grow until it suffocates me. I’ve gotten invested. What kind of a masochistic fucker am I?

The kind that lets a lost boy with a sad story and a sunshine smile pull me into his debt. I already know that Brendon’s a fucking idiot. I guess I’m one as well. Birds of a feather.

“We start with gettin’ the hell out of this godforsaken forest, changing into clean clothes, and hittin’ up the nearest bar. I don’t know about you, but I need a drink.”

Brendon grins again. “Sounds good to me.”

Yeah. It kinda does.

 


	3. Chapter 2 - Brendon

 

The realization strikes me somewhere between the clearing and the ranger’s station that I’ve never really killed anything before tonight. Well, aside from me shooting my mother in the head. I tell myself when the guilt starts to eat at me that she must have already been dead for that thing to be using her as a puppet, but some part of my heart just won’t let me believe it.  
  
I mean, I’m not Ghandi or anything. I love a good burger as much as the next guy and don’t feel bad for stepping on grass or some such bullshit, but I’d like to think that I place a pretty high value on life. When I was a kid, I’d trap spiders in a glass and carry them outside instead of squishing them. I always insisted that Mom buy humane, no-kill mousetraps if we ever got a squeaky little family taking up residence in our attic. Truth be told, I’m not really a violent person, and the fact that I just burned a big, snarling monster to a crisp is more than enough to have me sufficiently shaken.  
  
Ryan shrugs it off like he’s seen it all before (and he probably has), walking through the darkness and underbrush with a nonchalance that doesn’t match the massive red stain that’s spread across the front of his shirt. It’s weird; usually the sight of blood makes me queasy, especially after what happened last month, and yet I find myself thinking that it almost looks  _good_  on him. Not as a fashion statement, but as an indicator of who he is. Despite not being built for it - he’s got three or four inches on me in height but is so painfully skinny that he looks like a gust of wind will pick him up and carry him away - he  _looks_  like a fighter, a stubborn set to his jaw, wavy brown hair that’s just long enough to be rebellious, whiskey-colored eyes with a permanent look of cynical displeasure in them. He looks like someone who’s at home in the midst of blood and grit and death. His level of familiarity with it is inherent in the way that his hand constantly hovers close to the grip of the handgun shoved into his jeans, the way that I can see a coiled sort of tension underneath his bored stare, a constant vigilance that’s always waiting for something to come crawling out of the dark.  
  
Is this what I’m going to become, what Ryan’s offering to help me become? A steely, cold, impassive killing machine who can get up from the brink of disaster pouring blood and fighting broken bones and simply walk it off? Somehow I don’t think the persona will suit me quite as well as it does him. You won’t find ‘badass’ anywhere on the long list of adjectives that can be applied to me.  
  
“You sure you’re okay?” I ask him after many minutes of the two of us walking in silence, the dappled moonlight through the trees making him nothing more than a lanky silhouette a few feet in front of me. “It looks like you lost a lot of blood. We should probably get you to the ER or something?”  
  
“My guts ain’t fallin’ out, and I’m still conscious. No doctors.” At first the thickness of his accent made him a little hard to understand, but now that I’ve been around him for a few hours it’s gotten easier. Ryan’s got an honest-to-God Southern drawl. It’s nothing like the sharp, yappy twang that my cousins from West Virginia have, not even like my seventh grade math teacher who’d grown up in Texas. It’s something softer and slower, the consonants rounded and the vowels tilted until they come out with a different sort of flavor to them, beautiful in essence but the edges made rough by cigarette smoke and hostility. Vaguely, I wonder if I sound odd to him. Hell, we’re in Minnesota. The people here sound weird to both of us. Accents and doctors aside, though, Ryan keeps right on walking, the irritation present in his voice even if it’s too dark for me to see it on his face. “I can take care of myself. Got fresh clothes and a first aid kit in the car; we just gotta get to it first.”  
  
I entered the woods from the edge of the highway, dodging between trees and under bushes to avoid being seen. Ryan must have come in a different way, because after a few more turns we emerge onto a well-worn hiking trail, perfectly manicured and lined with quaint little wooden signs telling the types of plant life growing around. With idyllic scenes like this, it’s hard to believe that just a few short miles away there was a monster tearing people to shreds. This pretty little path? This was my world up until a month ago. The bloody, terrifying wilderness beyond? That’s Ryan’s world. Parallel, parts of the same universe, but still separate. I would give anything to go back to my blissful ignorance, but as it stands, I’m a part of that raw, violent, horrible world now. I’ve been pulled down the rabbit hole headfirst. Not sure if that metaphor makes Ryan my hookah-smoking caterpillar or my Cheshire Cat.  
  
The path ends at the back door of a ranger station, the lights all off and the wilderness around it utterly silent. I’m surprised by that until I pull my phone out of my pocket to check the time - just shy of midnight. I’m about to ask Ryan how he plans to get into a locked station (that has to be some sort of federal offense, but hell, I just fricasseed a Wendigo, why not?) but he cuts off my question before it starts by kneeling down in front of the door and pulling a lockpick - a real, actual lockpick - out of his jacket pocket, starting to jimmy it around in the knob. I’ve never seen someone pick a lock before. It’s not nearly as easy as they make it look on TV; by the time the door opens I’ve sat through ten minutes of Ryan mumbling and swearing, but eventually it gives way with a sharp click and opens into the darkness of the worn old building. Ryan flicks on the lights, tells me to stay in the lobby before disappearing out the front door. I can hear him shuffling around, the distinctive slam of car doors and then he’s back, a large duffel bag and a big white plastic first aid kit in tow.  
  
“Not sure how well my stuff’ll fit you, but you’re welcome to take your pick if you want,” he shrugs, pulling the zipper on the bag open and revealing clothes stuffed into it arbitrarily. Mom would have a coronary if she ever saw someone packing like that. The thought makes me suddenly, deeply sad. Ryan rummages through the haphazard piles of fabric until he comes up with a pair of jeans, an undershirt, and a plaid flannel button-up that looks like something you’d see on one of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour guys. I try not to laugh. And then any pretense of laughter I might have had goes flying out the window when he pulls off his jacket and yanks the blood-soaked t-shirt over his head, looking down to inspect the damage. “Aw, fuck.”  
  
The cut doesn’t look too deep, but it’s long and ragged and still bleeding very noticeably, stretching from his sternum diagonally down to stop just short of a bony, protruding hip. I can’t make sense of why he’s not freaking out. It must hurt like an absolute bitch, not to mention that if I looked down at myself and saw that kind of carnage I’d probably pass out. Instead, he just balls up the t-shirt into a wad of stained fabric and starts dabbing away at all the blood, steady, routine, like he’s done this a thousand times. When I take a closer look, I realize that he must have. Ryan’s whole torso is a mess of scars, some white and faded where others are still reddish-pink and reasonably fresh. In them I can see the outlines of claws, of teeth, the warped plateaus of burn scars and even what looks like it could be the remnant of a bullet wound settled in the valley between his collarbone and shoulder. Somehow, they’re fascinating to look at rather than grotesque like they probably should be. Maybe it’s my stupid curiosity rearing its head again, but I want to hear the stories of those scars, the defeated monsters they represent.  
  
After all the mess has been cleaned away, the wound doesn’t look nearly as bad, much shallower than I’d originally thought and already slowing the process of bleeding. Still mumbling something about damn spook bastards and not having the patience for stitches, Ryan pops open the first aid kit and sits it on the front counter, pulling a big bottle of rubbing alcohol and several rolls of gauze from its depths. I feel kind of useless just sitting here, so I clear my throat and offer a tentative “Hey, um, can I help or-”  
  
“No.” Ryan doesn’t even look at me, preoccupied with pouring a generous amount of the rubbing alcohol onto a wad of gauze, the air suddenly taking on a sharp, antiseptic smell. “Ain’t nothin’ that some Neosporin and bandages won’t fix. I’ve taken care of worse, kid, believe me. You ever pull a bullet out of your own shoulder with nothin’ but a pair of tweezers and half a bottle of Jack Daniels? Wasn’t fun, I’ll tell you that mu-  _goddamn motherfucker son of a bitch!_ ”  
  
He dissolves into a long string of very vibrant and creative profanity as he presses the alcohol-soaked cloth against the cut, hissing and swearing the entire time but still determinedly cleaning it until the bleeding has all but stopped and all that remains is a thin red line to indicate that any injury ever happened at all. I sit there and blink like an idiot through the rest of the procedure - butterfly closures on the thickest parts of the wound, some sort of foul-smelling antibacterial ointment, yards and yards of bandages wound around his whippet-thin waist until it all looks so much more sterile and manageable, hidden there under the folds of white. “Uh, yeah,” I nod stupidly with a vague wave of my hand in his direction. “You look like you’ve done your share of patching yourself up. Have a habit of collecting battle scars?”  
  
“Nah. They sorta come with the territory. You’ll get your share of ‘em,” he shrugs, raising his arms carefully and wincing as he pulls the undershirt over his head. “I’m, uh... I’m gonna go to the bathroom, I’ll just finish changing in there. You borrowin’ my clothes, or...”  
  
“No, no, it’s fine, I’ve got my own.” I don’t know why things feel so suddenly awkward - maybe because I made a pretty blatant allusion to the fact that I was staring at a guy I just met tonight shirtless? Way to go, dumbass. At any rate, it’s sort of a relief when Ryan disappears into the back, leaving me to pull an old UNLV hoodie and jeans out of my duffel, shed my dirt-and-blood-crusted clothes, and pull them on. I catch a glimpse of myself in the darkened window, all rumpled hair and the vestiges of fear still clinging to me. I look painfully out of my element. It’s no wonder Ryan keeps calling me ‘kid’ if this is what he sees, someone who looks so comparatively small and afraid. I try to stand a little straighter, to wipe the veneer of uncertainty from my features. It doesn’t work. Confidence has never been my strong suit.  
  
Ryan reappears a minute later, looking far better than he did when we came in. He manages to pull off the plaid flannel even though it would look hideous on most people, avoiding eye contact with me as he packs up his stuff and shrugs his jacket back on. Well, fuck. In hindsight, the whole looking at him with his shirt off thing might have been a bad idea. After all, he’s from Alabama. Don’t they still have the KKK down there or something? Did he think I was checking him out? I wasn’t checking him out. Snorting to myself, I roll my eyes. Arrogant asshole. I  _might_  find him attractive if he weren’t such an insufferable little shit, emphasis on the  _might._  If he’s going to get all weird with me then maybe the cure would be for him to not think so goddamn highly of himself. I’ve never been very good at reigning in my stupid mouth, and before I know it, a sharp paraphrase of my thought process is hanging in the air. “Hey, you can cut the awkward bullshit. Sorry for making a comment about your physique, Ross, but I wasn’t giving you the once-over.”  
  
“Yes you were.” Ryan’s deadpan is infuriating for the simple reason that it’s impossible to read into, the very beginnings of a smirk playing at the corners of his lips. “Forgot to mention that I have impeccable gaydar. And don’t look at me like I’m gonna hit you or something. Just because I’m from the South don’t mean I’m a Bible thumper. Hell, I’ve been known to... dabble.”  
  
“Dabble?”  
  
Another smirk. “Yeah, dabble.”  
  
“So what,” I ask, trying really hard not to laugh for some reason, “You’re... what orientation exactly?”  
  
He shrugs, digging around through his pockets and coming up with his millionth cigarette of the night. “I like to define myself as a freewheelin' pansexual. Problem?”  
  
“Not at all.” By this point, we’re both making a solid effort not to burst out laughing, shouldering our bags and throwing our dirty clothes into an old Walmart bag that Ryan managed to find floating around. “But for the record, deflate your head. I really wasn’t checking you out. Not my type.”  
  
“And what’s your type?”  
  
“Shorter, less scrawny, less of a douchecanoe.”  
  
“Your loss.” Ryan flicks off the lights in the station after a final sweep to make sure that there’s nothing to indicate we were ever here, pulling a set of car keys from his pocket with a jingle and nodding at the front door. “All right, time for those drinks. There’s a bar in walking distance of the motel I’m stayin’ at.”  
  
I was never one of those little boys that was obsessed with cars. That was always my brother Mason’s thing; I remember him having whole drawers full of Matchbox cars in his room, talking me through the make and model of each one on the rare occasion he decided to share them with me. The upstairs hallway became the Daytona 500, and down the track raced every sort of car imaginable, yellow T-Birds and green Chargers, blue Ferraris and black Corvettes. The car sitting in the ramshackle parking lot of the ranger’s station is a bigger version of one of Mason’s prized collectibles, gleaming in the guttering light of the lamp on the front porch. For the briefest second, I can feel sharp little edges and cold metal in my hand, hear the sound of plastic wheels skittering over hardwood mixing with my brother’s voice.  _That’s a ‘65 Mustang Fastback, Bren. Best car made that year._  I think the Matchbox version was white, but the one in front of me is candy-apple red, polished to a sheen and in absolute mint condition. I gape, taking a tentative step towards it with a sad thought that Mason would probably shit his pants if he could see this. “Is this  _your_  car?”  
  
“Yeah, so do me a favor and don’t drool on my paint job,” Ryan says offhandedly, walking around the side of the car and popping the trunk, throwing the bags inside unceremoniously. Before it closes, I think I see a glimpse of shiny-sharp metal and the polished barrel of a gun. Is there some kind of arsenal back there? Before I have time to ask, Ryan’s already pulled the driver’s side door open and climbed in, fumbling around briefly with his keys before turning to look at me. “You comin’ or not?”  
  
“Yeah, I uh... yeah.” Blinking bemusedly, I run around the front of the car and climb in the passenger’s side just as Ryan turns the key in the ignition - the engine in this thing purrs like a kitten, and I don’t even have to know much about cars to know that this one’s been well taken care of. It still has all of the original interior and fixtures, the only thing different from the vintage look a fairly new radio set into the dashboard, one that has an auxiliary port connected to a beat-up old iPod sitting in the cupholder. Whistling appreciatively, I run my hand along the dash, feeling the hum of the engine radiating beneath. “How the hell did you manage to get your hands on this thing?”  
  
“Family heirloom. It was my grandpa’s car to begin with; he gave it to Mom when she first started huntin'. And now she’s all mine.” Ryan pats the steering wheel almost fondly, grinning slightly.  
  
“Wait... your grandpa knew about your mom doing this kind of stuff?”  
  
“Yeah, he did it too. Family business. Mom’s family was a bit newer at it than Dad’s. Her father was the one that started huntin’ in the first place, passed it down to her. Dad’s family’s been at it since the twenties. I’m the fifth generation of Ross hunters. Well, now I’m the only Ross hunter, technically. Probably the last one, too. I’m not the ‘settle down and have kids’ type.”  
  
I know that it’s a bad idea, but I’m an idiot, so I ask anyway. “What happened to the rest of them?”  
  
Ryan’s grip tightens on the gearshift as he puts the car in reverse, eyes locked like chips of amber ice on the rearview as he peels out of the parking lot and onto the road. In the passing blurs of streetlights, I can see the almost imperceptible pulse of tension in his jaw. He very pointedly doesn’t look at me. “Same thing that happens to all hunters eventually. They all died bloody.”  
  
And now it makes sense, why he’d looked so angry back in the woods, back when I’d talked about losing my family like he couldn’t possibly understand what it felt like. I refrain from kicking myself, instead settling into the long, uncomfortable silence that follows, shooting nervous looks in his direction. “I’m sor-”  
  
“I don’t need or want your sympathy,” Ryan snaps angrily, taking his hands off the wheel and steering with his knee long enough to light the cigarette that’s been dangling out of the corner of his mouth for a few minutes now. He grabs at the iPod after that, flicking it on and pressing at the buttons until a Rascal Flatts song starts blaring through the speakers. Even though he hasn’t so much as given me a sidelong glance since we got in the car, he somehow picks up on the amused look I send his way, glaring out at the darkened highway with even more venom. “If you got a problem with country, there’s plenty of other stuff on there. Take your pick.”  
  
He wasn’t joking. When I curiously pick up the little device, I’m taken aback not just by the sheer amount of music on it - upwards of 20,000 songs, the home screen says - but by the variety. I go down the list of artists, and while it’s mostly classic rock - I scroll through a shit-ton of Iron Maiden and RUSH albums - and country ranging from Johnny Cash to Hank Williams to Toby Keith, there’s a lot of other stuff there too. A few indie bands I really like, the entire discography of blink-182, Frank Sinatra, death metal, the Beatles, and even - “Beethoven?” I laugh disbelievingly.  
  
He shrugs, cracking the window and blowing a plume of smoke out into the night. “Symphony Number Five’s good drivin' music.”  
  
“Fair enough.” I press the play button, and in a rush of sound the opening notes of the first movement are roaring through the car’s interior. Ryan smirks to himself, revving the engine in time with the cello line. And that’s how we go on down the road, doing twenty over the speed limit with our anger fading into hesitant smiles and Allegro Con Brio reverberating in the hollows of our chests.

* * *

By the time we roll into the motel parking lot, we’ve switched from Beethoven to Styx, and Ryan’s let his guard down enough to be singing along to Come Sail Away under his breath. The place is only slightly less skeevy than the motel I’d been staying at a few towns over - the exterior is still rundown and dirty-looking, peeling paint and flickering lights, but at least there’s no sign advertising hourly rates. Ryan shuts the car off and climbs out carefully, the cut obviously still giving him trouble even if he doesn’t say anything about it. “Bar’s right over there,” he says, nodding at a garish neon sign across the road. “You  _are_  twenty-one, right?”  
  
I raise an eyebrow at him. “We just killed some sort of malignant paranormal creature and you’re going to  _card me?_ ”  
  
“Not for the reasons you might think,” Ryan replies impassively, sticking out his hand. “Gimme your license.”  
  
Grumbling noncommittally, I yank my wallet out of my jeans pocket and pull my license out, handing it over. Ryan holds the little sliver of plastic up to the yellowed light of the buzzing streetlight overhead, squinting at the letters and numbers which indicate that I am, in fact, old enough to drink legally. He looks it over for a few more seconds before handing it back to me, shaking his head. “That’s your actual driver’s license.”  
  
“Of course it is. What were you expecting?” I ask, beyond confused as to why this is a bad thing as I pocket my wallet again.  
  
“I wasn’t expecting for you to have a weird-ass last name like ‘Urie.’ What’s that, Polish?”  
  
“Scottish. You’re not answering my question.”  
  
“You said you were on the run. If you want to stay on the down-low, flashin’ your ID to anyone that asks for it’s a little counter-productive.” He looks at me like I’m some kind of idiot for not already knowing that, and I start to feel like some kind of idiot when the hindsight hits me. A month of staying carefully incognito, and I almost just blew my cover for the sake of a Heineken. Ryan grins when he sees the sour look on my face, and it kind of makes me want to punch him. “It’s fine. I’ll handle gettin’ the drinks tonight, and then once we get up the road we should be able to make you a few new identities.”  
  
“A few?” I’ve heard of people changing who they are, witness protection and all that stuff. But faking  _one_  identity seems hard enough, forget juggling more than that. “Why a few?”  
  
Ryan nods in the direction of the bar, and we start walking, lone shadows moving across the desolate road. “Makes you harder to trace. You should see all the ones I’ve picked up in twenty-four years. I got two or three shoeboxes in the trunk full of fake shit. Driver’s licenses, credit cards, FBI badges, a PhD from Yale, you name it. Been everything from a Special Ops agent to a janitor at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If you can’t change your face, change your name and credentials. Easy enough to disappear that way.”  
  
In reference, he pulls out his own wallet, rifling through it and producing two cards that he holds out to me. One is a Georgia driver’s license with his picture on it registered to a Ryan Cromley, the other is a Visa Platinum bearing the same name. Frowning, I turn the credit card over and look at the markings on the back. It’s definitely a real one. So who’s paying for it? As far as I can tell, Ryan doesn’t  _have_  a permanent address, so where is the bill going? For the sake of my own moral security, I decide to ask a different question, handing Ryan back the cards with a sinking feeling in my stomach. “How do you get ahold of this stuff? That looks like a real license. No one’s able to do that with stuff you can find in a car or a motel room.”  
  
“You’d be surprised. I printed my National Park Service ID at Kinko’s last night,” he smirks, holding up another card before snapping his wallet shut and slipping it into his back pocket. “But you’re right, some of that stuff is hard to fake. I got a contact in Chicago that takes care of it for me. I’ll Skype him after we’re back in the room, introduce you. He’s... well, he’s what you’d call a consulting hunter, I guess. Manages my paperwork, handles the lore research that goes over my head, finds me cases, tells me fishy-lookin' disasters or crimes that I might need to look into.”  
  
“So, he’s the Nick Fury to your Avengers?” I venture.  
  
Ryan laughs at that, actually, genuinely laughs. It’s a nice sound, big and resonant in a way that contrasts with the thin monotone of his speaking voice. “Shit, don’t tell him you made that comparison; his head’ll swell to the size of Texas.” He’s still grinning as we duck into the bar, which is busy even considering how late it is. We still manage to snag a secluded table in the corner away from the rest of the general population, though, Ryan slinging his jacket over the back of a chair before he looks back at me. “I’m bettin’ you’re a beer guy, right?”  
  
I nod, folding myself into a creaky seat with a weary smile. “Yeah. Heineken if they’ve got it, whatever’s on tap if they don’t.”  
  
He disappears for a minute after that, leaving me alone to silently observe what’s going on around me. The bar’s inhabitants are mostly a bunch of scary-looking biker guys in leather jackets with admittedly majestic beards, gathered around tables and conversing at varying volumes depending on how drunk they are. The place itself is kind of gross, dimly lit with a permanent layer of grime coating everything. There’s an old TV perched above the bar, the grainy view of ESPN playing reruns of tonight’s Vikings game. Ryan and I are easily the youngest people in here, but somehow we don’t manage to stick out. I look at everyone. No one looks at me. I’m still a nonentity, and there’s more comfort in that than sadness. After hearing Ryan’s talk about fake ID’s and a lifetime of transient identities, I wonder if he even knows who he really is anymore. I’ve only been running for a month, and I’ve already started to forget.  
  
Before I have time to think on it any further he comes back, sliding a bottle across the table to me and occupying his chair with a collection of liquor that looks like it could knock out a bull elephant on a tray in front of him. “All right,” he says, knocking back a shot of something that might be whiskey and not so much as flinching. “We got a lot of talkin’ to do. If you got questions, kid, ask ‘em now.”  
  
“Um... won’t people hear us?” I ask quietly, casting a nervous look at our surroundings.  
  
Ryan snorts, already reaching for shot number two. “Most of ‘em are drunk off their ass or engrossed in their own conversation. Someone gets nosy, tell ‘em we’re talkin’ about a movie or something. Now, questions?”  
  
“I, uh...”  
  
Of course I have questions. I have so many questions, an unfathomable amount of questions rising in my lungs and pressing against the backs of my teeth, things I’ve been wondering since the second we met. But now, here, right in this time and place? They all seem to disappear, abandoning me when I need them most. I stutter and stammer like the idiot that Ryan must think I am, getting so mad at myself that some of the anger eventually transfers to the flippant little smirk he’s watching me with. My eyes narrow dangerously in his direction. “Fine, here’s a question for you. Ryan Ross’ School for Fledgeling Hunters. What the hell makes you qualified to train me? Just how much do you know?”  
  
“About this much.” With a heavy, dull thud, Ryan slaps a big leather book down on the table. It’s old and undeniably fancy, the cover embossed with a big scripted letter R and a red ribbon marking the pages about three-quarters of the way through the book. Curiosity piqued, I tug it closer and flip it open, starting to leaf through the pages. Every one I turn, the wider my eyes get. I travel through generations of paper, the handwriting changing from a perfect cursive to a hard-pressing shorthand to a sloppy scrawl and finally to an elegant, spidery print that must be Ryan’s. And every single page revolves around things that shouldn’t exist. I flip through handwritten articles on Vampires, Werewolves, Faeries, and about a thousand other things that go bump in the night that I’ve never even heard of. The page on Wendigos must have been written by Ryan’s grandfather judging from the writing, but I can see where Ryan’s added a few notes himself in the margins. It’s morbidly fascinating and terrifying at the same time, finding that everything that ever scared you as a little kid is actually real mixed with the fact that you’re holding a book full of ways to kill them.  
  
"Do you think the thing that killed my family is in this book?" A stupid question. A juvenile question. A question I can't help but ask.  
  
Ryan looks at me with something that could almost be sympathy, and it looks so out-of-place on his face that my stomach goes into a weird swooping motion. "That'd make it way easier on us if it is. But the burden of findin' out either way's on you, Brendon. I know it's gonna suck, but I'm gonna need you to tell me everything that happened. Every detail you can possibly remember'll help figure out what this thing is. I'd skip the unpleasantries and just go to your town and check it out but-"  
  
"We're not going back to Vegas," I snap, cutting him off. Ryan looks as surprised as I am at the conviction behind my voice. I am  _never_  going back to Vegas. The weight of the memories there would crush me, kill me. I can't go back to the place where I let my family die.  
  
"Well I was gonna say that if you been runnin' for a month then the crime scene's already cold anyway, but all right, no Vegas, your request has been noted," Ryan says placatingly, sliding one of his little collection of shots in my direction. "Here. Might make it a little easier."  
  
Inhaling shakily, I reach over and grab the detergent-spotted little glass, turning it skyward and feeling a pervasive burn rattle down my throat. It's shitty whiskey and it tastes like paint thinner, but after a few more minutes of silence a pleasant numbness starts to tickle at the tips of my fingers. Ignoring Ryan's squawk of protest that makes him seem more like an oversized bird of prey than he already does, I grab another shot and knock it back before he can stop me, waiting until the tingling has spread to my veins before I'm brave enough to give my nightmares voice.  
  
"The worst part is that it started out as such a normal night." The alcohol tastes bitter along my teeth, mixing with those awful bloody memories until I feel shaky and queasy. "We were having a big family dinner, all my brothers and their wives and kids came over. I'm the youngest, only one still living at home. So the whole family comes over, we're all sitting around the table, talking, laughing, the normal stuff. Mom's her usual self, all smiles. It was a Saturday; I'd been in the house with her all day and she was fine. But in the middle of dinner she goes really quiet."  
  
Across the table, Ryan has opened to a blank page in his big leather-bound book of monsters. Upside-down, I can see him writing  _Brendon Urie - Case Study_  across the top of the paper, jotting down a few notes afterward. When he notices that I've gone silent, he looks up at me slowly. Between the low lighting and the booze his eyes look infinite, sharp but regretful all at once. "I know it's hard, kid. But if you wanna catch this thing, I need to know what we're up against."  
  
"I know, I just..." I just don't want to relive it more than I already do every single night, going over and over the things that might have been different if I'd had it in me to be brave. How maybe I could have gotten a few of the little ones out if I hadn't gone running upstairs to hide, how I had the opportunity to jump in front of Mason but didn't, how I listened to my littlest niece screaming for her mother before her voice cut out with a sudden, wet rip. My grip on the edge of the table tightens until the wood splinters beneath my nails. The pain brings me back, at least enough to push onwards. I wasn't brave enough to save them. Being brave enough to avenge them is the only thing left for me to do, and it starts right here.  
  
"She lunged across the table and ripped Dad's throat out. Just ripped it out, with her bare hands. There's no way that's physically possible. And it was the most bizarre silence afterwards. We all just sat there, waiting for it to be a joke. And then she started killing everyone else, all of my brothers, even the kids. And she didn't even touch some of them, just looked at them and then they'd be flying backwards into a wall, or throwing up blood. And I... I ran. I'm not proud of it, but I was confused and scared and I ran, went upstairs and got Dad's .22 out of the closet. By the time I got back downstairs there was nothing left but blood and bodies, Mom standing it in the middle of it all. I didn't know what else to do, so I shot her. Right in the back of the head, bullet went clean through. But she didn't fall. It didn't kill her. I know it sounds crazy, Ryan, but she turned around and looked me right in the eye and  _laughed._ "  
  
He doesn't refute or validate me, just purses his lips into a thin white line and jots down a few more notes.  
  
"Next thing I know I'm slammed up against the wall and I can't breathe and I'm thinking this is it, this is the end. But then she didn't kill me. She just stood there and rattled off all this crazy stuff that didn't make sense, said she'd been waiting for me and that I had special blood or something. Then she said to run, that she was bored and wanted some sport. Next thing I know there's this nasty smoke stuff coming out of her mouth and then my mom's dead too, just laying there on the ground. The thing told me to run, so I ran. And then I met you. And now here I am."  
  
I'm surprised that I'm not crying. The alcohol lends a certain sort of numbness that I'm thankful for, something that doesn't erase the pain but still takes away the sharpest edges of it. It seems almost impersonal now. Pages from someone else's story, notes on a handwritten case file in a book of impossible things. All that horror and death and loss happened to Brendon Urie. I don't really know if that's me anymore. I don't know if I  _want_  that to be me anymore. There's less pain and uncertainty in the existence of a nonentity than there is in Brendon Urie's life. Maybe it's easier to do what Ryan does, to don and shed identities like clothes, only having to deal with what's underneath when you peel them all off and lay yourself bare. I don't know how long it's been since he's done that, but judging by his razored hostility and prickly demeanor, he's not ready to do it again any time soon. He's good at it, wearing those shifting identities. The only thing that could ever clue you into something deeper is that flash of sadness behind his eyes, the one you can catch if you look up at him very quickly before he manages to cover it. Maybe this is another skill he can teach me, how to pick yourself up and move on even though you fell apart ages ago.  
  
That sad spark lingers in the look he gives me, setting down his pen with a sigh. "I'm really sorry, Brendon. That's a heavy load to carry, man."  
  
"Was it heavy when you lost your family?" I ask, seeking empathy because the idea of sympathy from Ryan leaves a sickly, cloyingly sweet taste in my mouth. I'd rather commiserate with him than be the recipient of his pity.  
  
"We ain't here to talk about my family." He shuts the conversation down before it even starts, his walls going back up miles-high and all trace of emotion shutting down in him. It's like he can flip a switch and turn it all off. I'm not sure if it's amazing or sad. Amazingly sad. "But yeah, it was heavy. Real heavy."  
  
"How did you keep going?" The only thing that's been getting me out of bed in the morning for the past month has been the visceral urge to run. Now that I don't even have that anymore, what is there?  
  
"Revenge," Ryan says simply, shrugging and starting in on a Jack and Coke. "It's the best motivator there is. Got mine years ago, 'course, but after that... well, you sorta keep goin' because it's your only option. But you're a long way from that point, kid. I got a few ideas on what this thing was, but you need to answer some questions to help me narrow it down."  
  
"Okay?" I reply uncertainly, trying to read more of his upside-down notes. The whiskey has kicked in so much that it's not easy and I eventually give up.  
  
"After all this happened, could you smell sulfur in your house? It would have been real strong, like rotten eggs."  
  
I blink at him confusedly. "Why would that matter -"  
  
"Did you or did you not?" Ryan snaps, apparently out of patience.  
  
"God, excuse me for asking! Fine, no, I didn't. Plenty of nasty smells in the house afterwards, but sulfur wasn't one of them."  
  
Ryan frowns, scribbling something down in the book. "Okay. Had anyone in your family gotten  _really_  lucky over the past ten years? And your mom. At any point, did her eyes change? Gone solid black, maybe solid red?"  
  
"Uh..." I slur, struggling through the fog in my mind to think back ten years. "No, no huge lucky breaks that I can think of. I mean, my brother Kendrick won like a thousand dollars in the lottery my senior year of high school, but that's it. The eye thing, though, that happened. But they were green. Really bright, glowing green. Like... I don't know, like something radioactive."  
  
A small muttered something that sounds like "huh, weird," is the only response I get from Ryan for a few minutes as he pours back over the notes, circling some things and crossing others out. When he looks back up at me, it's with a grave, guarded expression. "You want the bad news or the worse news first?"  
  
"I'll take the bad news." I have a feeling that either one is going to prompt me into having a panic attack, judging by the way Ryan is looking at me like I just sprouted a second head.  
  
He inhales deeply, setting his glass down on the table and flipping back through the book until he lands on a page covered all the way to the margins in writing. Spindly fingers flip the book around until it's facing my direction, Ryan's face growing more apprehensive by the second. "Signs point to demonic possession. There's a couple things that ain't there, like the sulfur residue, but it's still lookin' like a demon to me. And if you got one of those bitches on your ass, you were right to run. I've only dealt with three or four in my whole life, and I damn near died every time. They're nasty little fuckers."  
  
The world swims, and I sway in my chair, already resigned to passing out. The page in front of me is covered with words like mass destruction and soldiers of hell and nearly impossible to kill. Basically, what Ryan's telling me is that I'm fucked. And that's not even the worst bombshell he has to drop. "And the worse news?"  
  
"It ain't like any demon I ever heard of." Ryan frowns again, tugging the book back and flipping through the pages. “There’re two kinds of common demon that hunters usually deal with, and you can tell ‘em apart by the eyes. A regular old demon, the grunt, worker-bee kind, they got black eyes. Then there’s crossroad demons; they’re a deal makin’, ‘Devil Went Down To Georgia’ type of thing, and they got red eyes. I’m friends with some guys that are experts on these things, so I’ve heard about demons with yellow eyes and even white eyes, but nothin’ about green eyes. We can’t go after this thing right now.”  
  
“So, what are you saying?” The panic is rising in my chest, pressing outwards against my ribs until I feel like I’ll burst wide open in a cataclysm of fear. Ever since Ryan agreed to help me, I’ve assumed that he knows  _how_  to help me, and the realization that I might have been wrong on that threatens to snap what’s left of my sanity. “Are you saying that this is some sort of super-demon? Unbeatable?”  
  
By now Ryan’s polished off the last of his drink, looking at me across the table over steepled fingers. He looks disturbingly calm and it makes me want to punch him right in the face. How  _dare_  he sit there looking almost-bored when I just saved his life and now mine is on the line? How  _dare_  he promise to help me and then admit to not having any idea what the hell is going on without so much as an apology or attempted backtracking? Through the stabbing, cold knives of panic rattling up and down my spine, I decide that Ryan Ross is a prick. He’s an abominable prick and it’s evident in the way he carries himself, in that infuriating look of superiority etched onto his face and his condescending attitude and his stupid hick accent and Christ, everything about him just  _screams_  prick. He must notice the dirty look I’m giving him, because he returns it tenfold, glaring daggers across the space between us.  
  
“I’m  _sayin’_  that this could be something new, and that it’s definitely something new to me,” he growls like it pains him to admit it, pawing around in his jacket and lighting a cigarette. I’m not sure about the smoking laws in Minnesota, but the bartender doesn’t seem to give a shit. “Fuckin’ news flash, kid - I ain’t the top authority on this stuff. I don’t know everything. I hunt things I know how to kill, and when I find something I  _don’t_  know how to kill, I learn how to kill it. Anything can die, Brendon. It’s just a matter of figurin’ out what it takes to gank it. But before we do that, you need to learn how to think like a hunter instead of prey. You’re not gonna do any good against this thing if you don’t even know how to defend yourself. You need to learn how to catch some smaller fish before you go chasin’ down demons. You saved my life. I owe you. I only wanna help you, so  _accept what I’m tryin’ to do here or get the fuck out._ ”  
  
I sit in stunned silence for a solid minute afterwards, watching Ryan seethe to himself and puff angrily away at his cigarette. Yeah, he’s a prick. He’s an arrogant, pretentious prick and in all honesty, I don’t like him very much at all. But he’s trying to help in his own verbally abusive, rough-around-the-edges way, and I suppose I have to be grateful for that. I grab what’s left of my beer and down it, the glass hitting the table with a dull thump. “All right. Guide me, sensei.”  
  
“You’re actually gonna listen to me?” Ryan says with a stunned look. I can’t tell if it’s genuine surprise or if he’s mocking me. Either way, it’s funny enough that I snort and break into a grudging grin.  
  
“Yeah. You’re kind of my best hope right now. I must really be fucked.”  
  
A sad, pensive look flashes across his face but is gone as quickly as it came, the words leaving his lips in that same thin tenor monotone. “I guess you must be.” Ryan hops up from his chair after that, grabbing his book off the table before turning on his heel and walking away. “C’mon. We got work to do.”  
  
I follow him back across the street with more than a little confusion. Didn’t he just say something about catching smaller fish? Was roasting a Wendigo not enough work for one night? His legs are miles longer than mine, his stride so much more lengthy that I have to jog to catch up. The motel is just as we left it, moderately scuzzy and relatively abandoned. Ryan walks back over to the Mustang and flings the trunk open, rummaging around through its depths. I’d thought earlier that there might be an arsenal in there. I underestimated it entirely. Strapped underneath a false bottom to the trunk there are enough weapons to arm ten people, machetes and swords, hunting knives and ceremonial daggers, a rifle, two shotguns, and three handguns, boxes upon boxes of silver bullets. And there are things besides weapons, too - big glass jars of dried herbs, gallon jugs of what looks like water, a huge bag of rock salt that looks like it’s supposed to go on someone’s driveway in the winter. After about a minute of sorting through all the stuff, Ryan shuts the trunk with an armload of jars and little boxes in tow, shuffling over to the door of Room 14 and juggling his handful of little oddities long enough to unlock it.  
  
It looks like something off of CSI. The walls are covered with news clippings and pictures of the victims, the centerpiece of it all a huge map of Itasca State Park. Thumbtacks and red thread connect the attack sites, a big circle drawn in black marker around the exact spot where we found the Wendigo, or rather, it found us. I let out a low, impressed whistle, stepping over the threshold and tossing my duffel down onto the bed furthest from the door, which is still made up as opposed to the one that Ryan’s clearly been sleeping in. “This is intense. How long were you tracking this thing before - hey, what are you doing?”  
  
Ryan’s already set himself up at the rickety table in the kitchenette area of the room, opening jars and boxes and muttering to himself. It takes him a few seconds before he realizes I’m talking to him and looks up, still distracted. “Oh, I’m just makin’ you something that should help you sleep a little easier.”  
  
I’m not really willing to partake in any herbal concoction that Ryan whips up for me, especially when I hear him mumble about the things going into it - two bones from a chicken’s foot, one unbroken spider’s egg, hemp, lavender, and something I could swear he called  _goofer_  dust. I’m getting ready to tell him thanks but no thanks when he dumps the whole mixture of ingredients onto a small square of leather, bunching it up in a little bundle and binding it with a long piece of cord. I can feel my face contorting in confusion, but I still grab it when he hands it over to me. “What the hell’s this?”  
  
“It’s called a hex bag. That particular recipe’ll keep you invisible to angels and demons alike. That thing won’t be findin’ you anytime soon as long as you keep that bag somewhere nearby,” Ryan explains, resealing all the containers and pulling an old laptop out of the drawer of his bedside table. He sits on the edge of his bed and flicks the thing open, cursing under his breath as it takes forever to warm up. “I’m gonna go ahead and make that Skype call, see if we can get you an appointment set up for those IDs.”  
  
Curious about the consulting hunter that Ryan had talked about earlier, I loop the string of the hex bag around my head until it works as a functional necklace, crossing over to crawl up on the bed behind him and peering over his shoulder. The laptop’s running some archaic version of Windows and my inner Mac lover cringes at the sight, but it does have a built-in webcam, and after a few more minutes of clicking and cursing, Ryan’s Skype comes up. He clicks on a name I didn’t get the chance to make out down in the corner of his contact list, and the video call interface pops up, a small thumbnail of the both of us staring into the webcam and blank blackness on the larger window.  
  
Ring-ring. Silence. Ryan frowns.  
  
Ring-ring. Silence. He huffs irritably.  
  
Ring-ring. Silence. “Come on, you lazy motherfucker.”  
  
Ring-ring. Click. The other end of the video call flashes to life, showing a really sleepy-looking guy staring blearily into his webcam. He’s still laying in bed if the sheets and rumpled pillows around him are any indication, the bluish light of his computer screen illuminating blackish, ruffled hair, dark eyes, impish features and a small visible section of a tattoo of intertwined thorns stretching across his collarbone. He blinks at the screen a few times, yawning widely. “It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning, you ass.”  
  
Ryan smiles sweetly, which looks really weird and just a little serial killer-esque. “You always come when I call, Pete.”  
  
“And you only call when you want something. Start talking so I can go back to sleep.”  
  
“I’m wounded. I’ll have you know that there are social motivations behind this call too. How’s Patrick gettin’ on?” Ryan replies, looking about as far from wounded as humanly possible.  
  
Pete yawns again, a heavily-tattooed arm crossing into the screen as he rubs at his eyes. “About as well as he can with a missing hand. He’s incorrigible, though. Already working a case with some witch doctors bringing up zombies down in Baton Rouge.”  
  
“Good for him.” The look on his face is genuine this time, a slight smile that only fades when he turns back to look at me, waving me into the camera’s radius. “Pete, Brendon Urie. Brendon, Pete Wentz, hunter extraordinaire and constant pain in my ass.”  
  
“Love you too, Ry,” Pete deadpans.  
  
“Brendon’s new. Lost his family about a month ago, ended up savin’ my ass today from that Wendigo you sent me after,” Ryan explains, tilting the screen back so everyone can see each other better. “I’m gonna help him learn the ropes, so we were hopin’ that we could head up your way so you can get him set up with some ID’s, maybe a credit card or two. And while we’re headed to Chicago, I need you to get on some heavy-duty lore research.”  
  
Groaning dramatically, Pete lets his head fall back to the pillow. “I can do the ID’s no problem, but why the library trip? My job is ID’s, fielding calls, and finding cases. Research is Patrick’s gig.”  
  
“Well, Patrick’s indisposed, and this’ll interest you.” There’s no room for argument in Ryan’s voice, something quietly determined on his face as he flips his book open and starts going through the notes again. “Brendon’s family got wiped out by a demon. We think. But there wasn’t sulfuric residue on site, and, wait for it. The thing purportedly had solid, bright green eyes. Killed his whole family but let Brendon live, said something about needing his blood. Heard of anything like that?”  
  
His interest clearly attained, Pete looks into the camera pensively, running a hand through his hair. “Nah. I got nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Pat talk about anything like that, either. Think we’ve got something new on our hands?”  
  
“As much shit as Sam and Dean’ve been messin’ with lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if we do,” Ryan says, and the two of them share an eyeroll that clues me into the fact that I’m definitely missing something here. “All right, so you get on that research. We’re lookin’ at a ten or eleven hour drive, plus meal breaks, so we’ll roll in about 7PM tomorrow.”  
  
“You got it, chief.” Pete salutes lazily at the camera, yawning again. “I’ll get the guest room ready. Now fuck off and let me sleep. Nice meeting you, by the way, Brendon.”  
  
“Yeah, uh... nice meeting you too?” The call has gone dead by the time I even manage to say anything.  
  
“Indolent bastard,” Ryan snorts, flicking the laptop shut and smirking over at me. “He hates wadin’ through books, but he’ll do it if something interests him. And he’s a good guy. He’ll make sure you’re all set.”  
  
“Who are Patrick and Sam and Dean?” I ask, remembering the other names that came up in the conversation.  
  
He gives me a wry half-smile in response, kicking off his shoes and flopping down on the bed. “I’m an oddity in this life. Most hunters have partners, and Patrick is Pete’s. They’ve been huntin’ together since they were kids. Patrick’s one of those scary-smart types, so they went into the consulting business, helpin’ other hunters out between their own jobs. He lost his left hand a couple months back, got in a nasty fight with a Crocotta and the thing ripped it clean off. Apparently he’s back on the job, though, so he won’t be around to do any research for us. As for Sam and Dean... well, they’re Sam and Dean. You have to learn about their bullshit through experience.”  
  
“Oh.” I kick off my own shoes, walking over to inspect the condition of my own bed. Some weird stains on the sheets, but it looks to be bedbug-free. I look back up at Ryan, perched atop his covers like a gangly bird, and I ask the question before I have the sense to stop myself. “Why don’t you have a partner?”  
  
“I used to,” he answers quietly, not looking at me in favor of fixating on a loose thread in his duvet. “After that, I guess I just got comfortable with being alone. Besides, I guess I got one now.”  
  
For some reason, those words make me smile more widely than I have in months, my face aching from a motion it’s all but forgotten. Being a nonentity has its perks, but it can’t ever compare to being part of something. “Yeah, I guess so.”  
  
Ryan smiles too, but his is softer, more guarded. Sadder. “Get some sleep, kid. Long drive tomorrow.”  
  
By the time I come back from changing into an old t-shirt and sweatpants in the bathroom, Ryan’s not in the room. There’s a brief moment of panic before I catch sight of his silhouette outside the curtains, shadow-hands drawing a thin line and a plume of smoke to his lips. I loop the hex bag securely around my neck, flinging the covers back and falling into half-consciousness before I even hit the pillow. I hadn’t known I was so tired. The only thing I remember after that is being cold sometime during the night, and the feeling of spidery fingers drawing a blanket up around my shoulders.  
  
It’s the first time in a long time that I sleep without nightmares, deep and dark and dreamless.


	4. Chapter 3 - Ryan

“No! Goddammit, Brendon, how many times do I gotta tell you how to do this?!”  
  
I’m not patient on my best day, and the throbbing tension headache starting to bloom behind the center of my forehead isn’t helping things. Minnesota to Chicago was a long, taxing drive, and in the past two days I’ve managed to grab maybe five hours of sleep, a few minutes at a rest stop on the highway and then a long nap on the living room couch at Pete and Patrick’s while Pete was taking the pictures for Brendon’s IDs. Said ID’s are currently in the making and we still have a few hours before they’re done, so Pete, the fucking genius that he is, decided to ask how good of a shot Brendon was. One thing led to another, the revelation came about that Brendon’s only shot a rifle twice in his life, and now here we are at a really seedy firing range about thirty minutes outside of town, both frustrated and edging towards homicidal. Good thing Brendon’s the one holding the pistol and not me. I’d be more worried if he was aiming at the person beside me.  
  
“Sorry! It’s not my fault that you open your mouth and all I hear is ‘nag, nag, nag, you suck, Brendon, nag, nag, nag!’ Do I fucking  _look_  like Annie Oakley?!” he seethes, and no, he sure as hell doesn’t. The collection of bullet holes that are anywhere but on the target is a clear enough indicator of that. I raise an eyebrow and nod at his abysmal efforts in a silent method of pointing that out, and Brendon just scowls at me, flexing his hands that are surely aching from the gun’s recoil after an hour of solid practice, if not progress. “I’m new at this, okay? Give me a break.”  
  
“Anything you’re shootin’ at ain’t gonna give you a break,” I reply curtly, grabbing the Glock I let him borrow (no way in hell he was touching my Beretta) out of his hand and firing three quick pot-shots in the direction of the target, no proper stance, no real aiming time. I turn around to look at my results, and each bullet has gone where I wanted it to, killing the paper outline-man on the other end of the range effectively - head, shoulder, heart. “You have to be able to do that when you’re out in the field, kid. No werewolf’s gonna give you time to line up your sights. Your problem is that you’re thinkin’ too much.”  
  
Brendon grumbles something that sounds like “fucking show-off” bitterly as I click the safety on the gun and hand it back to him, eyes narrowing to dark slits. He stares down the target like glaring hard enough will make the three little black holes in it go away, and looks even more irritated when they don’t, whipping back around to snap at me again. “Fine. Talk me through it again, not like it’s going to help.”  
  
Exhaling heavily, I pinch the bridge of my nose between the thumb and forefinger in a futile effort to quell the pain that’s now roaring along the inside of my skull. I’m tired, hungry, I  _really_  need a cigarette, and the mixture of Brendon’s attitude and incessant gunshots aren’t going to do this headache any wonders. Oh well. Roll with the punches, Ross. It’s not the first time you’ve been uncomfortable. “All right, hold the grip firmly with your right hand, index finger outside the trigger guard, thumb pointin’ forward in line with the barrel. Don’t have a loose grip or the kick’ll knock the gun back and break your nose when you shoot.”  
  
He fumbles around but eventually manages to roughly mimic what I’ve been trying to teach him for the past hour. “Like this?”  
  
“Close enough. Now you’re gonna wanna stand at an angle to the target, feet shoulder-width, your dominant foot forward. Line up your hips with the target.” Brendon looks at me like I’ve just instructed him to bend over backwards and kiss his own ass. “Oh, come on, the least you can do at this point is try.”  
  
“I  _am_  trying.”  
  
“No, you’re standin’ there like an idiot.”  
  
Brendon fumes silently to himself, whispering something about me under his breath that I only manage to get a vague impression of before shuffling around, his feet in the wrong place and his position completely off. “This feels weird.”  
  
“That’s because your stance looks like a flamingo with a stick shoved up its ass,” I deadpan in response, running a hand through my hair and huffing in exasperation. “Okay, fuck it, you’re not one of the ‘learn by experimenting’ types. Do you care if I touch you?”  
  
“Wh-what?” Brendon stammers, and it hasn’t failed yet to shock me, how young he looks when he’s caught off guard. Most of the time he gives off the vibe of a little kid facing down a whole schoolyard of bullies, acting bigger and tougher than he really is in the hopes that he won’t have to deal with the pain and humiliation of the world finding out that he isn’t what he claims to be. But there are these rare moments, these second-long snatches of vulnerability that skate across his face, all of the scowls and glares evaporating into something softer. I’ve only seen it a few times, glances caught from the corner of my eye as we drove down the highway, the darkened shadows of his face when I walked back into the motel room to find him dead asleep. Now I actually watch it play out, a physical process that changes his entire demeanor. His lips look fuller when they’re not pressed into a hard line all the time, his eyes wider and not so endlessly dark when he isn’t squinting at you through a death glare. His features are still stark and bold, the set of his jaw still strong, stubborn, but it all relaxes into something less harsh for the briefest moment. The white-knuckled grip on the gun relaxes, and I can almost trace the tension as it works its way out of his muscles. In the space of a heartbeat, the contrary little pain in the ass I’ve been stuck with for the past couple days becomes something fragile. I feel like an idiot for noticing the tight, aching sort of pang in my chest. I wonder if  _this_  is what he was before he lost his family. This Brendon, with his pretty eyes and parted lips half-extended around some formless word, this Brendon I could have liked.  
  
“So I can fix the back-asswards way you’re standin’. No wonder you can’t hit the broad side of a barn,” I cover gruffly, and just like that, it’s back to frowns and glaring daggers. Still, Brendon nods sharply after a long stretch of tense silence, gaze fixed on the target and hands beginning to flex again. The awkwardness in the air is thick enough to cut with a knife as I take a few steps toward him, an odd sort of tension humming through my veins that I can’t shake, gritting my teeth and trying to look as irritated as possible. “Your body needs to be be perpendicular to the target. Think about makin’ yourself into a line,” I snap, grabbing his shoulders and setting him up at the correct angle. “See? Now it’ll be easier to aim.”  
  
“All I see is a thrown-out back in my near future.”  
  
“That’s... for the love of God, kid, it ain’t hard to figure out. Your whole body needs to be lined up on the same plane. Head. Shoulders. Hips.” Without really thinking about it, I reach down and hook my thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans, pulling him the rest of the way into alignment. Brendon doesn’t do anything besides look a little more miffed than he already did, so I go ahead and assume that I haven’t crossed any boundaries. He has nice hips, almost girlish, but bony at the same time. Hadn’t noticed that before. Of course I hadn’t noticed. I had no reason to. I don’t have any reason to now. Fuck, the sooner I get out of here, the better. I hold him there so he doesn’t shuffle out of position, leaning down until I’m at his height, seeing the target on the same level as him. “All right, just bring up your arm nice and slow. Keep it straight, but don’t lock your elbow. Look down your sights and line it up with the bottom of your target ring to compensate for the kick. Take your time, breathe, and when you’re ready, gently squeeze the trigger. Don’t think of it as pullin’ or you’ll throw off your aim. Just calmly, slowly-”  
  
 _BANG._  
  
“Holy shit!” I jump back a good four or five feet, clapping my hands up to my now-ringing ears. “What part of ‘take your time’ did you not-”  
  
 _BANG. BANG. BANG._  
  
My headache has reached the level of a snarling monster clawing at the inside of my skull, clouding my vision slightly as I watch Brendon with that steely determination etched onto his face fire round after round until the gun clicks uselessly and he takes a few steps backward, falling out of his stance. Fuming, I stalk back over to him, yanking the Glock out of his grip angrily. “What the hell, Brendon?!”  
  
“You said I was thinking about it too much,” Brendon shrugs, a self-satisfied smirk settling over his lips as he raises a hand to point at the target. “I got tired of listening to you talk, so I just stopped thinking about it.”  
  
And there, at the end of the range, are four bullet holes in the target. Two head. One shoulder. One heart. Each one of them closer to the bullseye than my own. Caught between a proud smile at him finally picking it up and a bitter grimace at being one-upped by a rookie, I walk out onto the empty range and detach the target, holding it up until the buzzing fluorescents overhead shine through the bloodless wounds in the paper. “Well I’ll be damned. You’re a decent shot; all you gotta do is get pissed off.”  
  
“If I’m spending any amount of time with you, that’s not really an issue.”  
  
“You know what, Brendon?” The statement was probably meant to be a joke, I know, but something about it manages to hold a match to my infamously short fuse, and before I know it, there’s an explosion flickering on the tip of my tongue. “I don’t like you any more than you like me. In fact, most of the time I think you’re a stuck-up, self-important asshole. You saved my life and I owe you for that, but I  _don’t_  owe you a damn lick of courtesy in the process. So here are your options, kid: either you tolerate me and I tolerate you and we get this over with as quickly as possible, or you come to terms with the fact that if you push me I’ll push back twice as hard, and we’ll both be miserable.”  
  
“ _I’m_  stuck-up?  _I’m_  a self-important asshole?” Brendon sputters irately, working his way up to a rant of his own. “You walk around like you’re hot shit and  _I’m_  a-”  
  
“Yes. You are,” I cut him off, wadding up the target and chucking it in the trash on my way back to the parking lot. “Come on, Pete’ll have your ID’s done by now, and I want a real meal and a full night’s sleep.”  
  
I blast Kenny Chesney at full volume all the way back into town, silently daring him to make a single snide remark about it. He doesn’t. I’m secretly disappointed by that, the beginnings of a fight back at the shooting range not nearly enough to satiate the irritation blooming under my skin. Brendon’s fairly easy to get a rise out of, but I’d almost feel bad beating him up. Maybe I’ll head downtown later and pick a fight with someone twice my size, even up the odds a little. For all of his indignation earlier, Brendon doesn’t say a word the entire trip, glaring out at the road in front of us with his arms crossed over his chest. He looks like a petulant child and I’m about to tell him as much, but something makes me think better of it. He hasn’t exactly been running on a low stress level either. Maybe what we both need is a decent amount of sleep and a few hours away from each other, and then the whole situation might become more tolerable. I think back to the story of what happened to his family, of the terror in his eyes when both Pete and I said that whatever this creature was, it wasn’t anything we’d dealt with before. We’re flying blind here, and while that’s scary even for me, it’s probably hitting Brendon way harder. He’s the one with some paranormal enigma out for his blood. I’m not usually one to forgive or forget, but I decide to let him have his assholery over the past few days free of charge. Regardless of how annoying it is, I’ll admit that it’s somewhat justified. After a few more miles, I turn down the volume and switch my iPod over to Bon Iver, the hypnotic melody lulling away a bit of the bite from my thoughts. Brendon seems to take it as the extension of the olive branch, looking at me uncertainly before relaxing into his seat and uncrossing his arms, singing the chorus of Holocene in a soft harmony to the hum of tires on pavement.  
  
Pete and Patrick live in a somewhat-cramped townhouse in a decent part of Chicago, far enough from the ghetto that there’s no gang graffiti on their trash cans but still close enough to hear the gunshots. I had to beg Pete to let me use the garage because there’s no way in hell I’m leaving my Mustang sitting out in this neighborhood. Decent part of Chicago or no, I’m a country boy at heart and therefore have an inherent distrust for the environment of an urban metropolis. I have no desire to walk outside one morning and see my baby propped up on cinderblocks, stripped down to the skeleton. Pete drives a Prius; he’s already lost enough of his manly dignity anyway and no self-respecting thief is going to touch that thing. The garage door and the door that leads into the house are both open when I pull in, a fact that makes me raise an eyebrow as Brendon and I get out of the car. Pete’s usually a stickler about closing doors, not because he’s worried about anything nasty getting in (there are devil’s traps under the welcome mats in each doorway and all the hinges and window-fixtures are made of salted iron), but because he’s a cheap bastard and will whine about the heat getting out and raising the electric bill if someone leaves the door open for five seconds. I go ahead and put the garage door down on my way in, frowning as I walk into the downstairs of the house, what was once supposed to be a living area essentially turned into the most extensive hunter’s library in the Midwest. The walls are lined with bookshelves and display cases of rare curiosities, silver daggers and bottles of Vampire fangs, vials of holy water and an assortment of hex bags that will protect you from anything from demons to witches. A big, old-fashioned wooden desk is set up in one corner, its surface usually cleared, but now it’s piled high with a selection of dusty old books and two or three overnight bags.  
  
“That’s weird,” I mumble, shoving my car keys into my pocket and kicking the door to the garage shut behind me. “I wonder if-”  
  
“Pete, is that you?” An amiable, mellow tenor voice rings out over the hurried sound of feet on the stairs. Brendon and I turn around just in time to see a short guy with sandy hair and a million-watt smile come bouncing through the door of the library. He looks tired, bags beneath green-gray eyes that blink at us from behind thick-framed glasses, cardigan rumpled, a worn old black fedora askew on his head. He could be any given hipster-nerd Chicago resident if it weren’t for the permanent look of rapt, intelligent interest in his eyes and the compression bandage wrapped around the place where a left hand used to be. He grins even wider when he sees me, hooking his remaining thumb in his pocket and leaning against the doorframe. “Ryan Ross, you old dog. I haven’t seen you since you left for Aspen. Would it kill you to call once in awhile?”  
  
“I got busy after Aspen. Ain’t my fault you’re never around when I need something,” I shrug, a rebellious smile playing at the corners of my lips as I step forward and pull him into a brief but sincere one-armed hug. “Good to see you, Patrick.”  
  
“I just got back like ten minutes ago, couldn’t get the door with my hand full, thought you were Pete coming to yell at me for leaving it open,” Patrick prattles on, walking over to the desk and sorting through the books piled there. Brendon watches him with a sort of odd fascination as he stacks them in alphabetical order and starts reshelving them in seconds, all while still talking to us. Patrick’s mega-brain might be disconcerting to some people, but it’s so familiar to me that it almost feels comforting. He keeps talking about Pete and his stupid obsession with cutting their bills for almost a full minute before he notices Brendon standing there, stops in his tracks and offers him a friendly grin. “Who’s your friend, Ry?”  
  
“Patrick Stump, Brendon Urie. And vice versa, I’m not really feelin’ like the formalities right now,” I say, collapsing into one of the overstuffed leather armchairs nearby and gesturing vaguely between the two of them. “Brendon’s new. I’m helpin’ him track down the thing that killed his family. Pete’s out whippin’ up his ID’s still, I figure. We got here about five o’clock this morning.”  
  
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Brendon.” I’ve never understood it, how Patrick’s seen as much shit as he has and still manages to be unfailingly empathetic and kind. It gets annoying sometimes, actually. Normal humans aren’t supposed to be that nice, and when you put someone like Patrick with someone as bitter and cynical as I am, it’s a strange mixture. Still, he’s one of the handful of people in this world I call a friend, and I find that oddly enough, I’ve sort of missed his inherent sunshine. Brendon seems to have taken a shine to him as well, nodding and shaking his hand before walking over and occupying the armchair next to mine, still looking awestruck by the library’s contents. If Patrick notices what a blatant freshman the kid is, he doesn’t mention it. “So what are you two after?”  
  
“That’s part of the reason we’re here,” I reply, digging my journal out of my backpack and flipping it open to the handwritten case file I drew up in the bar the other night. I scan over it for the umpteenth time, waiting for something to come to me, but nothing does. Frowning slightly, I hold the book out to Patrick, pointing at where the relevant information starts when he takes it. “I actually don’t know. Never seen the likes of it anywhere before, and neither has Pete. What do you make of it?”  
  
Patrick takes the book back over to his desk and clicks the lamp on, grasping around for a pencil and a few sheets of blank paper before he sits down. From across the room we can see his eyes darting back and forth across the journal entry, lips moving soundlessly. Suddenly, to him, Brendon and I have ceased to exist.  
  
Brendon’s eyebrows furrow into a confused expression. “What is he-”  
  
“Shhh.” I raise a hand and cut him off, pointing in Patrick’s direction. “Just watch. It’s unreal.”  
  
He’s begun to write now, still scanning the case file but simultaneously scribbling down what looks to be a complicated diagram, words in circles connected by squiggly lines to words across the paper, a small list of names on one corner. Every few seconds, he’ll give an almost imperceptible shake of his head, scribble out huge sections of the chart and start over on a fresh piece of paper. Brendon watches him, awestruck, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed as well. After about five minutes or so, Patrick slams the pencil down and leans back in his chair, exhaling heavily. “Holy smokes.”  
  
“Got anything?” I ask, getting up and walking over to the desk with Brendon on my heels. I try to make sense of Patrick’s diagram but all I manage to see is a lot of names and lines and question marks, nothing definitive from my perspective at least.  
  
“I’ve narrowed it down as much as possible. I can rule out all Asian, Middle Eastern and African mythos with about ninety-eight percent certainty, most Druidic and Norse stuff with about eighty-five percent,” Patrick explains, pointing to the scribbled-out sections on the chart where things like Draugr and Bori have been cross-referenced with information from the case file and ruled out. “Looking at it objectively I want to say Demon, but...”  
  
“But the green eyes and the lack of sulfur at the site, yeah, that’s what got me too,” I nod, leaning on the edge of the desk and shuffling through Patrick’s notes again. Brendon looks completely out of the loop and half-terrified - and perhaps he should be. I’ve never seen a problem Patrick can’t solve, and I’ve never seen him look so defeated as he does when he chucks the pencil back into his desk drawer and looks up at me with a sigh.  
  
“There’s nothing specific on it that I’ve ever read, Ryan. I’ll keep working at it, of course, but this is entirely new to me,” Patrick says, looking like it physically pains him to admit it. “I hate to suggest it, but you might want to call the Winchesters, see if they can come check it out or at least send Castiel to look in on it.”  
  
I shake my head, grimacing. “Sam and Dean have enough on their plate. And I get the sneakin’ suspicion that Castiel doesn’t like me.”  
  
“Probably because of that time you got drunk and said that if Dean weren’t your best friend you’d totally fu-”  
  
“Oh for Christ’s sake, I was kiddin’ when I said that!” I burst out indignantly, ready to go into a tirade about how Cas gets his feathers ruffled too easily until the sound of the front door opening drifts down the stairs and all three of us turn to trace the source.  
  
“Who the  _fuck_  opened the window?” Pete demands angrily, stomping down the stairs and blustering into the library. “How many times do I have to tell you what it costs to heat this place, Ross, I swear I’m gonna send you the bill - oh, hi Pat - It’s twenty degrees outside! It’s going to  _snow_  tonight, man... wait. Patrick, how long have you been back? You were due in later this week.”  
  
“Just got here. Opened the window because it’s musty upstairs, so stop yelling at Ryan,” Patrick explains boredly, kicking his heels up on the desk and adjusting his fedora. “Turns out Baton Rouge wasn’t as tricky as we thought it would be.”  
  
Pete grins wickedly. “So did you take out those witch doctors  _single-handedly?_ ”  
  
Brendon gasps audibly, his eyes going wide with shock as he whips his head around to gape at Pete. I fucking lose it, though, snorting loudly and looking over at Patrick with a smirk that matches Pete’s perfectly. “Yeah, I heard about your tussle with the Crocotta. Looks like you’re finally livin’ up to your name, Stump.”  
  
 _“Ryan!”_  Brendon hisses, smacking me hard on the arm and looking so affronted that you’d think it was him we were poking fun at. He shifts from irate to confused when Patrick starts laughing, though, joining in with Pete and I until Brendon’s the only one silent, looking at the three of us like we’re all insane. Good call, kid. “Amputee jokes aren’t funny anyway, and you’re going to aim them at your  _friend?_ ”  
  
“You learn to laugh at stuff like that, Brendon. Laughing’s better than dwelling on it,” Pete says, producing a shoebox and handing it over to Brendon with a placating smile. “All right, you’ve got your basic starter pack in there. Two identities to start you off - two driver’s licenses, three credit cards, FBI, CDC, Homeland Security, business cards for various and sundry professions. The phone numbers on everything come back here, so if anyone asks to talk to your supervisor, they’ll be talking to me. Questions?”  
  
Brendon looks like a goody-two-shoes middle school kid who’s just been handed a massive bag of pot - offended, terrified, and morbidly interested. He takes the lid off the shoebox and pulls out the FBI badge, staring at it for a long time before he looks back at Pete, struggling for words. “I... you couldn’t think of a better alias than ‘Brendon Griswald?’ Really?”  
  
“I liked Christmas Vacation,” Pete shrugs, flopping down in my recently vacated armchair and flipping his laptop open. “And if you boys are interested in staying in Chicago while Pat’s working on figuring out exactly what your mysterious spook is, I’ve got an easy local case that might be good practice.”  
  
“After that Wendigo I could use some easy,” I nod contemplatively, scratching at the back of my neck. “What’re we lookin’ at?”  
  
“Well, it appears to be a murder house down by Navy Pier,” says Pete, pulling up a case file on his laptop and rotating it so Brendon and I can see the screen. “Eight deaths in the last sixty years, all in the same manner.”  
  
“Any connections between the victims?” I ask, an automatic response, my brain hard-wired to the little complexities of the hunt. Draw connections where you can. More connections, easier case.  
  
“Surprisingly blatant, actually. They’re all men. Not every man that’s ever lived in the house has died, but everyone that’s died in the house has been a man. And they all met a similarly cringe-worthy end.”  
  
“Which is?”  
  
Pete laughs nervously, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “City police are blaming a serial killer, or maybe an original and a copycat, now that it’s been going on for this long. Um, this is the part you won’t like. The vics all died of simultaneous blood loss and suffocation... by way of something ripping their dicks off and shoving them down their throats.”  
  
“Gnarly,” Patrick laughs. I notice that every ounce of color has drained from Brendon’s face.  
  
Even I twitch a bit, an unpleasant look on my face as I look over at him. “All right, Brendon, your first hunt. What do you think we’re after?”  
  
“A misandric ghost with anger management problems?” he offers in a choked, horrified voice, dissolving into a literal squeak of terror as Pete scrolls down through the crime scene photos.  
  
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinkin’ too - oh God, that’s  _nasty,_ ” I groan, turning away from the screen and trying not to feel the phantom pain in my groin that comes with even thinking about those pictures. “Could be a really pissed-off succubus, though. Hard to tell with just that information. We’ll take it, Pete.”  
  
“We’ll  _what?!_ ” Brendon looks like I’ve just told him that we’re going down some white-water rapids on a pool float. “I’m not really in the mood to lose my junk, thanks. Isn’t there... I don’t know, a _girl_  hunter that would be better suited to this?”  
  
“Not in the immediate area, and you’ve gotta learn somehow,” I shrug, stretching out my arms and yawning. “Ghosts are usually easy enough, anyway. I take on ghosts when I feel like I need a break after a tricky case. You’ll be fine.”  
  
“Don’t let him bullshit you, he did a poltergeist in Oregon two years ago that had him dangling by his ankle out a second-story window by the time I got there,” Pete grins, hitting a button on the keyboard and causing the wireless printer on the other side of the room to whir to life, spitting out the case file as he shuts the laptop.  
  
“I had the thing right where I wanted it,” I counter, looking affronted. “At any rate, I need sleep before I even think about diggin’ into a case. We’ll head out tomorrow, pick up some EMF readings, see if we can get some info on the place you might’ve missed. I call dibs on the guest room. You can have the couch, Brendon.”  
  
The sun is still shining through the window when I shimmy out of my shirt and jeans, crawling into the sweet, sweet embrace of the memory foam mattress on the guest bed. The pillows aren’t lumpy, the sheets smell like laundry soap and don’t have any mysterious stains, and I can’t hear anyone having sex on the other side of the wall. I have died and gone to heaven. I’m asleep less than a minute after wrapping myself up under the covers, the fatigue of the past days pulling me down, down, down.  
  
I dream of her the same way I always do, blood-soaked and trembling in my arms, pupils blown and eyes wide as they lock onto mine, pink-tinged tears dripping down her cheeks. Delicate fingers curl into my shirt and leave rusty handprints on the fabric, desperate, holding me there in the ruins of everything I ever wanted so I can watch her shudder and collapse, the life draining out of her second by second.  _Ryan, please._  I choke out a sob, try to blink back the tears. When my eyes open again, I’m looking at Brendon, just as bloody, just as scared. Just as dead.  
  
I wake up in the pitch-dark of some ungodly time of night with a ragged gasp, like I was holding my breath in my sleep. Maybe I was. The sheets are nothing but a tangled mess now, a cold sweat making them cling uncomfortably to my skin. It doesn’t take me very long to figure out that I won’t be going back to sleep, too afraid of what I might see if I close my eyes again. I kick the covers off and lay there for however many hours, staring up at the ceiling until my alarm goes off.  


 

* * *

  
“No way. There is no  _fucking_  way I’m going to-”  
  
“Look, I ain’t thrilled about this either,” I snap, yanking my keys out of the ignition and turning around to glare at Brendon venomously. I feel uncomfortable enough as it is without him making it worse. Pete said that my, and I quote, ‘redneck chic’ sense of style would look out of place with the character I’m presenting, so now I’m sitting here in my best pair of jeans, a black button-up Oxford shirt that I actually bothered to iron, and a gray cardigan I borrowed from Patrick’s closet before we left. Give me a Starbucks, a pack of American Spirits, and some Ray Bans, and I might as well have walked out of a Forever 21 catalogue. Brendon looks admittedly nice, having brought some dressier clothes with him from Vegas that I hadn’t seen until today. Bowties look stupid on most people, but he’s got a way of making it look good, paired with a rolled-sleeved dress shirt and some sort of vest. He looks at home like this, like he’s used to being in clothes that weren’t made for running and getting dirty. Me? This fucking cardigan feels like a straightjacket.  
  
He glowers at me, still probably more pissed off that I’m making him do the job with me in the first place than anything else. “I still don’t get why we’re doing this whole charade in the first place. It seems pointless.”  
  
“The house is for sale. That means there’s two ways to get in - breakin’ in at night, or takin’ a tour. I’d prefer not to risk arrest if I don’t have to, so here we are,” I explain, pointing at the realtor’s sign on the front porch outside Brendon’s window. “There’s no way that two male roommates are gonna be in the market for this little gem of domestic ideology, so I told the real estate agent what she’d already assume anyway - we’re newlyweds, got hitched in Massachusetts over the summer, and we’re movin’ back here so you can be close to your mother. It’s not even gonna take that long. I just have to be in there long enough to poke around and take some readings, and then we don’t have to worry about it. I think you can pretend to like me for twenty minutes. Quit your bitchin’.”  
  
Brendon grumbles mutinously as he gets out of the car, but he doesn’t protest any further. Even though I’m miserable and awkward in this situation as well, I can’t deny there’s a sort of satisfaction in getting to piss him off, so I offer the brightest of smiles as I hop out of the driver’s side and head over to join him on the sidewalk, darting down and grabbing his hand before he has the chance to pull away. The look he gives me is nothing short of murderous. “You’re pushing your luck.”  
  
“Come on, sugar,” I smirk, relishing in the glare I can feel sinking into the back of my skull as I pull him along behind me up onto the porch. “Let’s go look at our dream home.”  
  
“I hate you so much,” Brendon hisses under his breath, squeezing my hand with a crippling, vindictive strength until I can hear my joints pop. But to his credit, he’s a better actor than I am, breaking into the spitting image of that sickly delirious-in-love attitude that hovers around newlyweds when we catch sight of a pretty, dark-haired lady in a suit getting out of her sharp little black Audi and walking up to meet us. He grins and clutches my arm excitedly, looking up at the second-story windows. “I really hope the master bath is nice. I want to put in a jacuzzi tub.”  
  
“We’ll talk about that once we’re sure we can afford groceries,” I smile fondly, ruffling his hair. He gives me a look of shameless adoration. Oh, the games we play.  
  
“Well, you two seem excited!” Suit Lady has finally made it up to the porch, fixing us with a plastic smile as she adjusts the little badge with the realtor’s logo pinned to her jacket.  
  
“Oh, we’re over the moon,” I nod, yanking my hand out of Brendon’s still-painful death grip to extend it in her direction. “You’re the one I spoke to on the phone, I think. Vicky, right?”  
  
“That’s right. Pleasure to meet you in person, Mr. Whitmarsh.” Vicky the Realtor has almost as tight of a grip as Brendon’s, and underneath the veneer of her smile is pure steel. I don’t think she’s someone I’d want to piss off if I knew her outside of work.  
  
“Mr. Whitmarsh is my father, I’m Ryan,” I counter, turning on the Southern charm for all it’s worth and hoping it will soften her up a bit. I can’t have her be on the alert if I want to get two seconds alone in here. “And trust me, we’re happy to see you too. I’m liable to go nuts if I have to spend much longer livin’ with Bren’s mother, bless her heart.”  
  
Vicky laughs as she pulls a gleaming keychain out of her pocket and opens the front door, standing back long enough for Brendon and I to walk inside before shutting it behind her. “I hear the same thing from a lot of newlyweds. Have you been in town very long?”  
  
“About a month and a half,” Brendon interjects before I have time to whip up a lie, twining an arm around my waist and grinning up at me. “We really want to find the perfect place. Isn’t the foyer pretty, Ryan?”  
  
“Yeah, cute,” I mumble, taking a few seconds to remember what the hell a foyer is before directing my attention back to Vicky with a self-effacing smile. “I’d have been fine with an apartment for the first couple years, but he’s more into the whole picket fence and a dog thing, so here we are. Go ahead and call me indulgent.”  
  
“I’m sure you’ll be much happier having your own place,” Vicky beams, walking us into the kitchen and flicking the lights on. “You’re an adorable couple. How did you two meet?”  
  
“College,” I say.  
  
“Book club,” Brendon says, overlapping me, and we both fix each other with a brief, horrified look as Vicky raises an eyebrow. He recovers before I do, laughing and grabbing my hand, tugging me over to look at the appliances. “We met at a book club in college. We’re both literature nerds. He invited me out for coffee and mentioned that he loved Tolkien. I was a goner. Speaking of which, babe, you mentioned wanting somewhere to convert into a library. You want to scout around down here while Vicky and I go look at the master suite?”  
  
Brendon is ten times better at this on pure instinct alone than I’ve ever been with years of training, and it sort of leaves me in awe, how easily he wears this other persona. If I didn’t know better I could almost say that there was genuine fondness in his smile, real affection in the way he squeezes my hand before letting go, almost like a reassurance. I blink a few times, trying to regain my composure before giving them both a stilted nod, realizing that Brendon’s trying to buy me time. “Sure, sounds great.”  
  
I wait until I can hear them walking around upstairs before pulling the EMF detector out of my back pocket. Within seconds of me turning it on, the thing starts whirring for all it’s worth, a high pitched noise that makes me panic and scramble to turn it off before it can bring Vicky and Brendon back downstairs. Well, there’s that mystery partially solved. I climb the stairs quietly, listening to the distant sound of Brendon prattling on about ceramic versus marble tiles as I enter one of the bedrooms overlooking the back porch. Still stepping as quietly as possible, I sneak over to the window and slide the latch open before backing out of the room hurriedly. Realtors always make sure the doors are locked, but there’ll be no reason to check the windows. Humming absently to myself, I follow the sound of Brendon and Vicky’s voices down the hall, ducking into the master suite and knocking on the bathroom’s doorframe to make my presence known. “Find the space for that jacuzzi tub, sweetheart?”  
  
“Maybe.” Brendon and Vicky share a conspiratorial grin, and before I have time to blink we’re attached at the hip again, his fingers tangling up with mine as he curls into my side. “Find a place to put your library?”  
  
“Yeah, there’s a good space down the hall. In fact, I think we’ve found  _exactly_  what I thought we’d find,” I say pointedly, shooting him a look while Vicky has her back turned. Brendon’s eyes widen, a break in character that he catches in a second, shifting effortlessly back into that scintillating smile.  
  
“Perfect. I still think we should go back to  _Mom’s_  and do a bit more research before we dive in, though.”  
  
“I couldn’t agree more.”  
  
Vicky is even nicer to us once she thinks we’re definite potential buyers, practically following us to the car until we promise her three times that we’ll call to set up an appointment and swear to bring Brendon’s mom next time we come to check the house out.  
  
“God, that was exhausting,” Brendon sighs once we’re back in the car, undoing his bowtie with a yank and slumping back in his seat. “We were almost fucked with that college and book club mix up.”  
  
“Yeah, but you covered really well.” He looks at me like I’ve grown a second head. What, I’m not allowed to give credit where it’s due? Fine, I think to myself, I’ll just make a point to be an asshole to him no matter what from now on. “You’re good at this actin’ stuff. It’s always been hard for me.”  
  
“I did drama in high school, but thanks, I guess,” he shrugs, fiddling with my iPod as I start the car. We’re quiet for a few minutes as I pull out into traffic, the haunting opening notes of Xanadu by RUSH filtering through the speakers.  
  
“Didn’t know you liked them,” I muse eventually.  
  
“Dude, Geddy Lee’s a badass,” Brendon grins, and before long I’m smiling too, even though there’s nothing to smile about. “So it’s a ghost, then?”  
  
“Yeah, ninety-nine percent sure it is. Electromagnetic levels in that place were practically off the charts. So now it’s just a matter of findin’ out who died in that house that’d have an agenda for chokin’ guys with their own junk,” I nod, hitting the expressway that will take us back to Pete and Patrick’s.  
  
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” Brendon pipes up, looking out the window at the blurred outlines of cars we pass. “Everyone that’s died in the house has been a guy, but not every guy that’s lived in the house has died. That’s got to mean that this ghost is going for a narrower demographic than just men.”  
  
I blink out at the road, surprised by the fact that I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’m losing my touch. “Yeah, guess you’re right. But where are you headin’ with that train of thought?”  
  
“I mean, I was thinking... ‘I’ll rip your dick off and choke you with it.’ What does that sound like to you?” He says, looking at me like I’m stupid for not getting it right off the bat.  
  
“Hell if I know. Sounds like someone’s...  _oh._ ” I’m so caught up in the realization that I blow right through the stop sign at the end of Pete and Patrick’s street, some old lady in a Camry honking and flipping me off as we breeze by. “Brendon, that’s smart. That’s fuckin’ smart.”  
  
“It sounds like someone’s angry girlfriend, right?” Brendon nods, seeming to luxuriate in the fact that I’ve called him something other than an idiot or a pain in the ass. He hops out of the car the second I put it in park, bouncing excitedly on the balls of his feet as he keeps on with the explanation. “So what if there’s some angry dead chick in that house who’s going after adulterous men? I mean, all the guys that died had wives and families. What’s to say they weren’t all cheating?”  
  
“You just saved us hours of research,” I say, shaking my head disbelievingly as I open the door and walk down the short hallway that leads to the library. Something stops me before I get there, though, and without really being aware of it, I turn and look at Brendon with something almost like admiration. “Y’know, I think I might’ve been wrong about you, kid.”  
  
He looks like he isn’t sure of whether to frown or smile, staring at me incredulously. “What do you mean by that?”  
  
“Some people are better hunters than others. Most people just pick it up as they go, but then some just have the gut for it.” Praise from me is rare, but when I give it, it’s sincere. “You got the gut for it, man. If you didn’t, there’s no way you could’ve figured that out. Good on you.”  
  
Brendon absolutely beams, rushing ahead of me into the library and scrambling around for his laptop. Patrick looks up from the paperwork on his desk with an expression of good-natured confusion. “Did you just win the lottery or something, Brendon?”  
  
“No, something even more impossible happened. Ross just gave me a compliment.”  
  
Patrick fixes me with the oddest sort of smirk, like he knows something I don’t, and I roll my eyes at him before settling onto the couch next to Brendon, telling him what to type into Google to bring up information on the house. Maybe he’s got a good gut instinct, but so do I.  
  
And my gut told me something really, really weird when he smiled at me like that.  


 

* * *

  
“And you’re sure this is her?” I ask, looking at the grainy picture by the light of my phone screen. Brendon managed to find one after hours of scouring the archives of the local papers, but a blown-up obituary photo from 1953 isn’t the greatest quality by a long shot. The girl in the picture is pretty, old-school pin-up pretty, with big eyes and a pixie-like face and an alluring smile. I can’t tell through the black and white tones of the photo, but her hair looks lightish, like it might be sandy blonde or maybe even red, a long string of pearls wrapped around a swan-like neck. She doesn’t look like someone that’d be capable of ripping a guy’s dick off and choking him with it, but who am I to judge? Another car drives by and I look up for a second, blinded by the headlights. No one’s said anything about us being parked outside the house yet, but I’m still a little antsy.  
  
“The story fits the case,” Brendon nods, turning the radio down and producing another sheaf of papers. “Her name’s Hayley Williams. In 1945, her high school sweetheart comes home a decorated war hero. They get engaged in 1948, married in the summer of ‘49, and by this time he’s a successful businessman and they’re pretty much loaded as far as money goes. He builds this house for her in 1950, and they move in right after the birth of their first child. It’s all wedded bliss from there, at least officially. One more baby, continued success of the business endeavor, basically the American dream. But then on June 5, 1953, Hayley falls down the stairs, breaks her neck along with several other bones and dies. The kids are with their grandmother, the husband’s at work, no one finds her body until the housekeeper comes in that afternoon to clean. They have a funeral, and it’s packed with grieving friends and family.”  
  
“So why is she our spook?” I ask, glancing down at Hayley Williams’ smiling face again. “An untimely, accidental death don’t make a spirit that angry. And what evidence of the husband cheatin’ is there?”  
  
“Because one month after the funeral, the husband collects the insurance, moves out of the house and gets remarried. One month after his wife has an unfortunate fall. Coincidence?”  
  
“So he killed her for the insurance and used it to pay for his wedding to his mistress,” I frown, a bitter taste in my mouth. “Dick. How come the police never looked into it?”  
  
“Apparently the guy had a solid alibi, people to cover for him. There was an investigation, but the whole thing was ruled out as an accident,” he shrugs, flipping back through the papers and pulling up something that looks like a scan of an old police report. “But if Hayley’s habit of murder by castration is any indicator, I’d guess that she’s pretty pissed. She never got her justice. Her husband lived a long, fruitful life and died at the ripe old age of eighty-four. That enough evidence for you?”  
  
“Yeah, I’d think so,” I nod, setting the picture down on the dashboard and frowning up at the house. “Okay, we’re gonna need to know where she’s buried. The way you get rid of a ghost is by saltin’ and burnin’ its human remains.”  
  
“Are you saying that I’m going to spend my night desecrating some poor girl’s grave?”  
  
“Yes, Brendon, that’s what I’m sayin’. Now tell me what I need to know, oh Research Guru.”  
  
“Um, I’ve got the write-up on the funeral somewhere in here...” he mumbles contemplatively, shuffling back through the stack of information. “Oh, right here! Um, it says that... It says that her body was too mangled for an open casket funeral, so the family cremated her and scattered her ashes out on Lake Michigan.”  
  
“Oh, fuck  _me_ ,” I hiss under my breath, reaching for a cigarette to calm my nerves. “This just got way more complicated. If this chick was cremated, that means her spirit’s attached to something else. There’ll be something in that house that belonged to her, something sentimental, and that’s what’s keepin’ her here. We’ve gotta find that object and salt and burn it.”  
  
“Why is that more complicated?” Brendon asks, folding the papers up and putting them in the glove compartment. “Sounds easier than digging up a grave.”  
  
“Because if we go bustin’ in there with salt and lighter fluid, she’s gonna know we’re after her, which means she’ll try and stop us. You feelin’ like gettin’ your cock ripped off, because I’m sure not,” I scowl around a long drag, breathing out a cloud of smoke into Hayley’s inked visage before flinging my door open and walking back to open up the trunk. “All right, now or never. If we’re goin’ in, then we’re goin’ in armed.”  
  
Brendon frowns, clearly struggling with the idea. “Are we going to... shoot the ghost?”  
  
“Not with bullets,” I tell him, flipping up the false bottom of the trunk and tossing him one of the two shotguns I keep in there followed by a box of bright-red shells before claiming the other gun and more ammo for myself. “These shells are filled with rock salt. Trick I picked up from some friends of mine. It won’t kill her, but it’ll slow her down. Remember how I showed you to load and fire one of these yesterday?”  
  
He nods gravely, holding the shotgun like he’s afraid it’s going to blow up right there in his hand. I keep forgetting that while he might have the gut for this life, Brendon’s still not confident in it, in the idea of killing something indiscriminately. He doesn’t say anything as he follows me around the back of the house, up the trellis and in through the window I unlocked earlier, both of us hitting the floor with muffled thumps and held breaths. The house is quiet as a grave, which really isn’t a comforting thought.  
  
“All right, if you hear anything weird, if you see anything weird, if you feel any cold spots, holler for me,” I instruct Brendon in a whisper, inching slowly towards the door. “We’re gonna split up, search the house for anything that might have belonged to Hayley. Something little and personal, maybe a scarf or a piece of jewelry, something that might’ve had sentimental value. If anything comes at you, shoot first and ask questions later, got it?”  
  
Brendon nods, his face tense and moon-pale, and we set off. It proves to be a harder task than I thought. While the original light fixtures and things are still in place, nearly all of the furniture is gone from the house, and the stuff left behind is modern enough that it must have been from the previous owners. There’s no decor lying around, no trinkets, no nothing. The house is a blank slate. By the time I’ve scoured the bottom floor I’m starting to feel hopeless, and by the time I feel a cold spot on my way upstairs I’m starting to feel scared. I find Brendon in the master bedroom, crouched next to the old owner’s bed and frowning contemplatively. He jumps when he sees me and reaches for his gun before he realizes who it is, breathing out shakily and waving me over. “Find anything?”  
  
“Whole lotta nothin’. How about you?”  
  
“Nothing up here, either, but then I saw this,” Brendon hums, tracing the floorboards around the nearest leg of the bed frame with his fingers. “These marks on the wood are old. Probably means that a bed sat here before this one. You can see some marks where other furniture used to be but isn’t anymore.”  
  
He gestures vaguely to his left, and I can see what he means, the dark indents in the floor from what might have been a dresser or a wardrobe’s presence there years ago. I don’t get why he’s so fixated on the Williams family’s interior design choices, but Brendon’s been proven to have good hunches before, so I give him the benefit of the doubt. “All right, what’s your thought process?”  
  
“My grandma grew up during the Great Depression,” Brendon explains, standing up and throwing his weight against the bed frame until the whole thing moves aside with a tortured groan, exposing the dusty floor beneath. “When I’d go over to her house as a kid, I remember she’d always keep all of her money and gold jewelry in this big glass mason jar because she didn’t trust the banks. And she hid the jar under a loose floorboard in her bedroom.”  
  
“And Hayley Williams would’ve been from that same generation,” I nod, a disbelieving smile stretching across my face. “That’s brilliant.”  
  
“I thought so too,” he grunts, prying at something seemingly invisible in the floor until one large section of the wood gives way with a muffled creak, sending a cloud of dust rising into the air. Brendon gives a breathy, victorious laugh, reaching down into the hole. “Jackpot.”  
  
He draws up a small, dust-encrusted container, about the size of a small jewelry box, holding it out to me carefully. I take it from him with just as much care, fiddling with the little latch on the front until it gives way and the lid swings up. It’s a music box, an eerie, tinkling, out-of-tune version of ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ playing as the old gears turn and the chipped ceramic figure of a dancing couple spins around and around. Sure enough, as per Brendon’s grandmother, inside the box is a roll of cash bound by a faded red ribbon and a long, beautiful string of freshwater pearls. The exact same pearls, if my hunch is right, as Hayley wore in her obituary photo. For some reason, I feel inexplicably sad as I pick the pearls up, letting the strands drip through my outstretched fingers. Sympathy for a ghost? I’ve spent too much time around Patrick. “What do you bet these were a wedding present from hubby dearest?”  
  
“I don’t really care what they are, let’s just torch the things and get out of here,” Brendon whispers, looking around nervously. “You said she’d try to stop us. Where is she?”  
  
 _Someday when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold..._  I know the song by heart because Mom used to have the Frank Sinatra version on vinyl, would play it while she cleaned house. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but she’d sing along anyway.  _I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight..._  
  
“I don’t know, but if we’re gonna gank this thing, I wanna see it with my own eyes so I know the job’s done,” I say softly, pulling a can of Morton’s salt and a little bottle of lighter fluid out of my backpack. I place the pearls back in the box almost reverently, scattering the salt over them and dousing the whole box with lighter fluid.  _Yes, you’re lovely, with your smile so warm, and your cheeks so soft..._  
  
Still nothing. Not the slightest cold spot, not a single indication that Hayley’s anywhere in this house trying to protect the last semblance of life she has left. Brendon blinks confusedly, standing up and pacing a tight circle around the floor. “She only goes after cheaters. Maybe she won’t come out unless you’re some sort of adulterer.”  
  
 _There is nothing for me but to love you, and the way you look tonight..._  Once upon a time in a life I barely remember, a happiness I can barely recall having, the Michael Bublé version wafted from the speakers of my car in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio. I held a lithe, willowy body in my arms, swayed back and forth even though I’ve always been a shitty dancer, didn’t care that it was about to rain or that I was getting ten thousand mosquito bites because she was  _beautiful_  and I was so stupidly in love and it was all that mattered. I watch the little porcelain couple in the music box spin and spin, lost in thought. “What’s your definition of cheatin’, Brendon?”  
  
“Um... I don’t know. I don’t have that much experience with it,” he shrugs, giving me a concerned look and walking over to kneel down next to me on the floor. “I guess if I had to slap a definition on it... cheating is loving someone and trying to have someone else at the same time.”  
  
“But you have to love the person to cheat on them?” I ask, still watching the dance, around and around.  _With each word, your tenderness grows, tearing my fears apart, and that laugh that wrinkles your nose touches my foolish heart..._  
  
“Yeah, I think so. If you don’t, then you’re just in a sham of a relationship anyway. There’s nothing to betray.”  
  
“Oh. Well then I know how we’re gonna get her out here,” I say simply, a brief, terrifying memory of last night’s nightmare flitting through my head a split second before I grab Brendon by the shirt collar and crush his lips against mine.  
  
It’s not what I expected. He’s not pliant or receptive in the slightest, seized up in a state of shock in those few infinite moments. Not that I needed him to be. All I need is the principle of the thing, the presence of it in this house, of loving someone but trying to have someone else at the same time. A second passes, or it might be a minute, an hour, a decade. Some immeasurable stretch of time filled with the distant strains of music and the unidentifiable taste lingering cloyingly sweet on his lips, and then I’m blasted backwards, my head colliding painfully with the bedframe. The music box plays on far past the time it should have stopped.  _Lovely, never ever change, keep that breathless charm, won’t you please arrange it?_  
  
“How  _could_  you?” Hayley hisses down at me with her ruffled hair and bloodstained dress, a manicured hand closing around my throat. Somewhere a million miles away Brendon is gasping in panic, fumbling for his shotgun, but it will be too late by the time he gets to it. “She loved you.  _She loved you._ ”  
  
“I know,” I croak, flicking the Zippo in my hand to life and chucking it at the music box. The memory of Hayley Williams evaporates into silvery smoke, and I’m left with nothing but an aching head and an aching heart.  
  
“Th-that... you are so fucking  _stupid!_ ” Brendon seethes, running over to me and helping me back to my feet. I don’t reply, watching the fire consume the box and sending the song crackling into an unrecognizable, warped version of itself.  
  
“She loved someone who didn’t deserve it. Why the hell do people stay in relationships like that?” I wonder aloud, fixated on the pearls melting together in the miniature inferno.  
  
Brendon looks at me with something a little too close to sympathy for my own comfort. “That’s how most relationships work. You ever been in one?”  
  
“Yeah,” I admit softly. “Once.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“And I lost her.” The fire burns itself out to smoldering embers and wreckage, but as I turn to go, I can still hear the notes of the song reverberating in my ears in time with the electric tingle that still lingers on my lips.  
  
 _‘Cause I love you, just the way you look tonight..._


	5. Chapter 4 - Brendon

 

Coming from a month of nothing but running and fear and uncertainty, getting back into a routine feels weird.  
  
In the week following that terrible, confusing night at the haunted house, I find myself pulled into the well-oiled machine of life at Pete and Patrick’s. I’ve heard some of the other hunters that drop in at all hours of the day and night refer to it as HQ, and I sort of subconsciously adopt the name every time it crosses my thoughts. I really am living in some sort of hunting headquarters, part library, part database, part deployment station, and even part hospital - I watched Pete stitch up some guy who’d been mauled by something called a Rakshasa the other day and nearly passed out. It’s constantly busy here, and everyone has their role, including me. It’s nice to be a part of something again.  
  
In the mornings, I sit through Hunting 101 lessons with Patrick, my time split between him teaching me about all the spooky stuff that exists in the world and helping him with his research on whatever my particular monster is. In the week we’ve been at it, I’ve learned more than I thought possible, although the same can’t be said for Patrick’s progress. I’m still completely awestruck watching him at work, the way he can pull the tiniest facts out of thin air and weave rationalizations in seconds. My small handwritten case file has grown to encompass the entire library, diagrams and sticky-notes plastered to every available surface until the place has been wallpapered by the story of how my life went to hell in a minute flat. But whatever this thing is, it’s got him completely baffled to the point that sometimes he’ll get up and leave the library with a frustrated growl, wandering the house and talking to himself for long stretches of time before he comes back with that same old unfailing smile and chipper attitude. Patrick’s one of those Nutty Professor types, I decide. A complete genius, but a little flaky. I like him.  
  
My afternoon lessons with Pete are usually a little more hands-on and admittedly more fun. I learn how to shoot  _without_  having someone yelling at me the whole time, and it’s surprisingly easier when I’m not feeling so pressured. I learn how to talk my way into restricted areas, loopholes I never knew existed. Pete seems to know  _everyone,_  and over the course of the week, he introduces me to what he assures me will be an indispensable network of contacts in my future. There’s Jon, a hippie-looking sort of guy that wears flip-flops even in the middle of the Chicago winter and can throw a knife so accurately that he skewers an apple off the counter from the hallway outside the kitchen - he tries to teach me, but I only end up putting a brutal stab wound in the drywall and cutting my hand in the process. William, who’s a self-proclaimed vampire expert, swings through one day to ask Pete if there are any new cases on the radar and stays long enough to give me some tips on how to properly decapitate a bloodsucker. An endless tide of hunters seems to always be dropping in for one thing or another, although the vast majority of the time the visitors are Andy and Joe, hunting partners and really close friends of Pete and Patrick’s. Between the two of them and Pete when he’s not busy dispatching people on cases, fielding calls, or helping Patrick, I manage to pass my crash course in the more physical parts of hunting. I’d never known the proper way to throw a punch before, how to fall off high surfaces and not break bones or what the correct form is when something’s coming at you with a knife or claws. It’s a different sort of knowledge than I’m used to, and even though I go to bed bruised and aching every night, it’s still oddly gratifying. I feel like I’m taking my first steps towards fighting back.  
  
But of all the faces I see running around HQ, I see Ryan’s the least. He’s been giving me a decidedly cold shoulder ever since the night we got rid of that ghost, and it doesn’t take a genius to guess why. For all his blustering about me being a stupid kid, the depths of his immaturity never fail to amaze me. So he kissed me. Big deal. It was a means to an end and  _I_  know it, something that was necessary to lure Hayley’s ghost out of hiding. I don’t know if he’s avoiding me because he’s afraid I’ll think it meant something or because _he_  thinks it meant something, but I don’t really want to think about the outcome either way. Besides, I know better. By his own admission, he kissed me because he’s in love with someone and the action qualified as cheating. That’s all the evidence that either of us need to realize that the whole event didn’t mean a damn thing, and the fact that I’m being the mature one in the situation when it was  _me_  that got my lips attacked with no warning manages to make me absolutely irate when I think about it. Irate, and a little sad.  _I lost her,_  he’d said, a crippling sort of pain flashing across his face, and the selfish part of me couldn’t help but be offended. I don’t like Ryan and he doesn’t like me, but something about the knowledge that he’s more emotionally invested in a memory than the person who saved his life still stings a little more than it should.  
  
I don’t know exactly what he does, but he’s almost never here. Sometimes Pete will put him on a case nearby and he’ll disappear for a day, coming back tired and haggard-looking and sleeping for a solid twelve hours behind the tightly shut door of the guest room. Other times I’ll hear him up moving around at weird times, the distant rumble of the Mustang’s engine rising from the garage and disappearing into the night. After those nights he almost always rolls back in around nine or ten o’clock the next morning, smelling like a whiskey distillery and a range of cheap perfumes and colognes, downing a handful of Advil before holing himself up in his room again for the rest of the day. Pete and Patrick act like this is normal, but it bugs the shit out of me. Ryan’s got no right to throw himself a pity party lamenting something he  _chose_  to do, and I’m beyond fed up with him refusing to look at me and only offering conversation in the form of clipped necessities like ‘D’you got a lighter?’ or ‘Go get Pete.’ I like to think of myself as a pretty laid-back guy, but as the days pass that irritation festers, building up to a sharp hum beneath my skin every time he shoves past me in the hallway. There’s a tension building up between the two of us, a hydrogen bomb with our hands hovering over the red button, and I’m left wondering when this place that’s become my safe haven is going to turn into a fallout zone.  
  
We’ve been at HQ for a week and three days when it finally explodes.  
  
It starts off as a normal enough morning, nine o’clock finding me sitting in the kitchen having a cup of coffee with Andy and talking about the manufacturing process of silver bullets. He’s a pretty cool guy, covered in tattoos and generally putting off the vibe that he could snap you like a twig until you find out that he’s a vegan and a civil rights activist and a genuinely nice person to boot. Joe and Pete are downtown looking into a local case, and Patrick kicked me out of the library twenty minutes ago, blustering about how he needed space to think. I’ve been hearing bouts of cursing and the occasional small explosion coming from down there ever since, but I don’t think butting in will help the situation.  
  
Andy’s rattling off some obscure fact about hollow-point rounds versus standard fare when the door that leads downstairs to the library swings open with a bang. Assuming that it’s Patrick finally emerging from his mind palace, I smile and hop out of my chair, heading over to the counter. “Hey, just in time, fresh coffee. You want any, or d-... oh.”  
  
The venomous look Ryan’s shooting at me from the doorway of the kitchen stops me mid-sentence, and I just stand there holding the coffee pot and blinking like an idiot. There’s a period of heavy, tense silence, so potent that even Andy picks up on it, looking back and forth between Ryan and I confusedly. After what feels like an eternity, the moment finally breaks. Ryan apparently decides that getting a cup of coffee and some ibuprofen out of the cabinet is worth having to breathe the same oxygen as me for a few seconds, stalking over the threshold and snatching the coffee pot out of my hands while pointedly not making eye contact with me. I want to punch him right in the jaw. Now that Pete’s actually taught me the proper way to do so, maybe I could actually manage to break it. God, that would be fantastic, rendering Ryan Ross incapable of running his stupid mouth. I try to think of something clever, some sort of well-aimed jab that will bring him to his knees under the crushing weight of my unbeatable wit. Yeah, that’s not going too well for me. All I can think of as he fills up a chipped mug and shakes an overdose-worthy handful of Advil into his palm is that he smells like a mixture of bottom-shelf liquor and the cheap fog of Axe body spray, that there’s a noticeable line of heliotrope marks blooming up from his collarbone to the hinge of his jaw when he knocks back the pills with a grimace.  
  
“Was he cute?” I ask sharply, because Ryan doesn’t seem like an Axe guy and I have no clue why thinking about the source of those bruises pisses me off so much - actually, yes I do. Whoever Mystery Guy was, I’d lay money on the fact that Ryan wasn’t an ass to him for the sole reason that their lips and God knows what else made contact.  
  
“He was decent lookin’,” Ryan says evenly, setting his coffee down with a sharp thud on the counter and fixing me with a look that practically emanates murder. “But the more important question is why the hell you think it’s any of your fuckin’ business.”  
  
“It’s my  _business_  because you’ve been a complete asshole to me for a week, and this whole drowning your sorrows spiel is such an overdone chick flick trope that it’s making me physically ill,” I hiss, matching his glare and raising him one heaping measure of righteous indignation.  
  
“Don’t feel special. He’s an asshole to everyone,” Andy observes mildly, flipping through the newspaper on the table.  
  
Ryan turns around slowly, a look of placid, unflappable calm on his face. It’s absolutely terrifying. “Fuck off, Andy.”  
  
The tone of his voice is mellow, almost conversational, but there’s an undeniable malice underneath it that has Andy, who I’ve seen roundhouse kick Pete Wentz into submission more than once, hightailing it out of the kitchen in less than ten seconds. I feel sort of betrayed and suddenly, frightfully alone. The thought strikes me from some fragmented place in the back of my mind that this is the first time Ryan and I have been in a room by ourselves since that night at the Williams’ house. Patrick mentioned to me once that there’s a sub-species of Djinn that feed off of human fear. I wonder if Ryan has any Arabian demon-creature in his blood, because he only seems to grow taller and more intimidating now that my last line of defense has left me. This is his tactic, trying to put his walls up to unscalable heights and scare me enough that I leave of my own volition. It’s worked until now, all those glares and moments of pretending I didn’t exist quelling me into a complacent silence. But something changes in the sunlight filtering through the blinds, lighting up the hangover in his eyes and casting shadows over the planes of his face. I will not look at his lips. I  _will not_  look at his lips.  
  
He looks at me like a cat with a mouse caught between its paws, coolly analytical as he mulls over the best way to rip me apart. “You got somethin’ you wanna say, Urie?”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” I don’t know what it is that makes me brave, lends that extra lick of fire to my blood and makes words I’ve been biting back for a week roll off the tip of my tongue, but part of me thinks it has something to do with those little purple-blue testaments of hypocrisy seared into the column of his throat. Pete says that half of a fight is having the courage to not back down, and I pray he’s right as I take the few steps into Ryan’s personal space and prod a finger sharply into his chest, punctuating each infuriated word I spit at him. “I want to say that what happened was a result  _your_  actions, not mine, so you should stop treating me like I’ve got the plague because of a decision  _you_  made. I’m not some lovelorn schoolgirl that’s going to be all up in your shit because of one meaningless and frankly lackluster kiss, so stop flattering yourself. You seem to be missing the part of the equation where  _I don’t like you._  Oh, and this whole brooding alcoholic thing? It’s not cute. There are more productive ways to deal with the fact that you’re butthurt because your girlfriend left you.”  
  
Whatever I’ve just done, it goes far beyond the desired effect. Ryan reels back like I’ve just slapped him, what little color there was left draining from his face. For once in his arrogant, pretentious, irritating life, he doesn’t have a damn thing to say. There would be a sweet sort of victory in that if I didn’t watch what happens next. Those walls that have been flying up every time he comes within ten feet of me? I watch them crumble. It’s a physical shift, almost like watching a time-lapse of the seasons changing, a fire burning to ash, an abandoned city falling to dust. He curls in on himself slightly like something’s dealt him a heavy blow to the chest, one spindly hand shooting out to grab the counter in an effort to keep himself upright. But it’s his face that undoes me. The usual careful impassivity is gone now, and the hurt that sits in its place is crippling. Ryan’s been this emotional rock since the day I met him, standing indifferently to everything the world throws at him like he’s seen it all before. But something in what I just said has ripped his foundation out from under him, turned him into something that I know the look of all too well - a scared, sad, lost little boy. The placid veneer drops out from behind his eyes and I find myself wishing I could look away. It’s like peeling back sterile white bandages over a gaping, festering wound, a whole tidal wave of things I never wanted to see jumping out and aiming with deadly accuracy right for the sinking pit in my stomach. For a horrifying second, he looks like he might either pass out or burst into tears. I instantly wish I had never opened my mouth.  
  
I liked him better numb. It was easier to hate him that way, when I could pretend that we didn’t have any common ground at all.  
  
Unsure of the level of hell I’ve just unleashed, I can only stand there and watch with a morbid brand of fascination as Ryan goes step-by-step through the process of putting himself back together. It starts in his eyes, the wounded look reeled back in until they’re nothing but unreadable amber disks again. Then his face, back to a neutral deadpan. Then his posture, shoulders back and head high in a good imitation of confidence. And then his demeanor, walls back up higher than ever before, an icy malice directed at me so tangibly that the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There’s something violent in the tension of his jaw, and for a moment I think he’s going to come unglued in a different way and beat the shit out of me. He doesn’t though, simply standing there and staring at me, an eyebrow slowly inching upwards as if to ask  _Is that all you got?_  
  
As if I hadn’t seen him falter.  
  
He’s daring me to say something about it. I can see the challenge in his silence, read the implication that if I dare to call him on his moment of weakness, all bets will be off and he  _will_  put me in the hospital. I’ve risen to enough of Ryan’s challenges for one day, so I simply content myself with having the last word, storming out of the kitchen and snapping hatefully over my shoulder, “I’m starting to think death by demon is preferable to dealing with your bullshit. You’re a dick, Ryan. You’re an irrational, self-pitying, obnoxious  _dick._ ”  
  
Seething, I turn on my heel and storm out of the kitchen, shoving past Andy in the hallway and slamming the door of the guest room behind me. Ryan’s been sleeping in here since we arrived, so it’s not technically  _my_  space, but I can’t go into the library with Patrick busy and Pete doesn’t like people in his office when he’s not home. As far as my options go for finding somewhere to be alone and cool off, it’s either here or the bathroom. Gulping in furious, ragged breaths, I spin arbitrary circles and pace like a caged animal, trying unsuccessfully to get the memory of that wounded look on Ryan’s face out of my head. I shouldn’t feel like an asshole. I was perfectly justified in everything I said to him. I shouldn’t feel like an asshole.  
  
So why do I?  
  
After a few minutes pass and I’ve calmed down enough to have a rational thought process, I sit on the edge of the bed with a defeated sigh, running my hands through my hair. The guest room is small just like the rest of the house, but it’s bright and must have been clean before Ryan moved in, decorated in sky blues and sunny yellows. The bed’s unmade, the covers all kicked to the bottom like they’ve been exposed to the throes of a restless sleeper. Suddenly exhausted, I kick my shoes off and crawl up into the center of the mattress, pulling the rumpled blankets over me and curling up on my side. Maybe when I wake up this will all have been some hideous nightmare. The pillow smells like something other than the laundry detergent it was washed with. Woven into the cotton is the stale scent of Marlboro Reds, a rich undertone of Old Spice, a faint, fresh whiff of shampoo I think might be Pert. It’s a relaxing smell, and I breathe it in deeply before I realize that it’s Ryan’s pillow I’m laying on, Ryan’s bed I’m curled up in like some helpless thing. My eyes snap open, but there’s already the lead of sleep settling in my veins, and I don’t have the willpower to get up. Instead I just lay there and look around the room, noting the little nuances that Ryan’s residence has added. The leather jacket he was wearing the first time I met him has been tossed carelessly over the back of a chair settled into a small reading nook in the corner. A selection of things from the arsenal in the Mustang’s trunk are scattered over the top of the dresser - a few boxes of ammunition, a silver dagger, a frayed hex bag, and a flask of holy water. Dirty clothes litter the floor in blatant disregard of the white wicker laundry hamper by the door. The bedside table is now home to a half-empty pack of cigarettes, an overflowing ash tray, and a worn leather wallet with something illegible embossed onto the edge.  
  
Frowning, I pick the thing up and squint at the faded lettering until I can just barely manage to make out the letters G.R.R. pressed into the leather in the long-distant echoes of what was once an elaborate monogram. Still confusing, since I have no idea who G.R.R. is and I don’t recall hearing Ryan talk about finding any wallets recently. Wondering sleepily if maybe it belongs to one of the hunters that have been running around the place this week, I flip it open to check the ID. I don’t find what I expect. Inside the wallet is exactly seven dollars cash, three or four fake ID cards bearing various names and occupations, and one faded, rumpled photo tucked into the pocket where a driver’s license would usually go.  
  
I’ve never seen Ryan smile the way he does in that picture, a wide, somewhat goofy grin that sits endearingly lopsided on his face. He’s a few years younger in his face but  _decades_  younger in his eyes, bright with mischief even through the fading ink and the creases in the paper that make lines through the bright summer sky and the otherwise immaculate state of his vest and tie. A lanky arm is slung around the shoulders of a beautiful girl with her short blonde hair in a braided crown and clever, dark eyes. She’s barely up to Ryan’s shoulder even in her high heels and vintage sundress, curled into his waist with a familiarity that matches the smile on her sharp, elvish face as she looks up at him. They look happy.  _Ryan_  looks happy. That’s so hard for me to process that I eventually just decide not to do it, chucking the wallet back onto the bedside table and giving into the nap that’s dragging at the edges of my consciousness.  
  
I don’t know how long it is before I wake up, but the first thought I have after regaining consciousness is a harrowing one - I’m going to have to apologize. While I know that Ryan wouldn’t grant me the same courtesy,  _someone_  in this dynamic has to be the bigger person. Sighing, I roll out of bed and try to finger-comb my hair back into some semblance of order, venturing out into the hallway and poking my head into the kitchen. Andy’s coffee mug is in the sink and his newspaper is gone, so he must have left. A glance out the front window shows that Pete’s Prius is still absent from the driveway. Ryan’s nowhere to be found in the kitchen or living room, and I’m pretty sure Pete’s office is locked. Frowning, I head downstairs and step into the library, waiting for Patrick to look up from his paperwork and acknowledge me. Don’t want to yank him out of his mind palace. “Um, where’s Ryan?”  
  
Patrick fixes me with a somewhat annoyingly knowing look, setting his book off to the side and perching his elbow on the desk, chin cradled in the heel of his hand. “I don’t know what you said to him, but it must have been brutal. He’s out in the garage working on his car. That’s his proverbial happy place, his therapy, you know. Ryan only works on his car when he’s really sad or really pissed off. Judging by the state he was in when he came through here, I’d say both.”  
  
“I... shit,” I sigh, leaning against a bookshelf and quietly feeling bitter towards Patrick for looking at me like he knows something I don’t. “I said some stuff earlier that was out of line. I was perfectly justified to call him on being a douchebag to me for the past week, but I should have left his girlfriend out of it. I didn’t know he was still touchy about them breaking up.”  
  
“Oh God, Brendon, you  _didn’t._ ” The horror on Patrick’s face makes me distinctly uneasy, his expression shifting from vague amusement to shocked apprehension in a second flat. “ _Tell_  me you didn’t bring her up.”  
  
“Christ, was it that bad? Did she cheat on him or something?”  
  
Patrick groans, burying his face in his hands. “They didn’t break up, Brendon. She’s dead. Has been for four years. And Ryan... it was rough on him. The guy you know? That’s not the Ryan Ross I met five years ago. Losing her really screwed him up, and, well... you know as well as I do how he deals with emotional issues, which is to say he doesn’t. As a rule, we don’t talk about her. Last time we tried, Pete ended up with a broken nose.”  
  
My heart sinks all the way down to my shoes, bores through the soles, and drills into the floor beneath my feet. I think back to the pretty blonde girl from the picture with the playful smile, of the easy way Ryan’s arm fit around her shoulder. I feel like the world’s biggest asshole. I  _am_  the world’s biggest asshole. It makes sense now, how Ryan had crumbled when I crossed the line, the quiet agony in his voice wrapped around that soft, fragile _I lost her._  It even makes sense why he’s been avoiding me. Not because of his own agenda, not because of bitterness towards me, but because of guilt. The same guilt I feel whenever I think about my parents or my brothers or the grand extent of all the family I lost because of my own cowardice.  
  
And there it goes again, that horrible realization that Ryan and I have far more in common than I want us to. It’s a terrifying thought, both because I represent what he used to be and he represents what I’ll surely become someday. I shake my head slowly, staring off into the space behind Patrick with no idea of what I’m really looking at. “I’ve got to apologize to him. Jesus, I feel awful.”  
  
“Ryan’s not one for apologies. You go in there with an ‘I’m sorry,’ he’ll probably bite your head off,” Patrick warns, picking up his papers again, apparently done with my personal issues. “Advice from someone who’s known him for years. He doesn’t like apologies, but he’s been known to accept peace offerings. There’s a little country kitchen run by this old lady from Georgia a few blocks from here. They make a killer chicken pot pie. You know how Southern boys love their comfort food.”

 

* * *

  
By the time I make it back from Mabel’s Country Kitchen with a carryout bag of wonderful-smelling food in tow, Pete’s car is in the driveway and both he and Patrick are sitting in the living room waiting for me. Patrick must have brought him up to speed on the situation, because he walks over with a grimace and claps me on the shoulder, looking at me like he isn’t certain he’ll ever see me alive again. “Be brave, kiddo.”  
  
“Christ, he’s a skinny guy with a bad attitude, not a mountain lion. How bad can it be?” I squeak, trying to sound confident and not even coming close.  
  
“Actually, I can draw at least five parallels between a mountain lion and Ryan when he’s in a foul mood...” Patrick mumbles absently, counting on his fingers. I decide to not wait around for his analysis lest I lose my nerve, heading downstairs and barreling through the door of the garage with the distinct sensation of being a soldier charging into a minefield.  
  
AC/DC is blasting so loudly from the battered old boombox on one of the shelves that I can feel the bass line reverberating in my bones, Angus Young’s guitar riffs howling through the air and bouncing off the concrete. No one will be able to hear me scream. “Uh, Ryan?” I offer feebly, looking around for him in panicked confusion. “I brought-”  
  
I realize with a faint  _duh_  moment that there’s no way he’ll be able to hear me over the screeching chorus of Thunderstruck, so I putter over to the stereo and flick it off, looking around the garage again. “Ryan?”  
  
A faint clatter, and then Ryan’s head pops out from under the car, scowling at me. “Turn the stereo back on and get out.”  
  
I jump about a foot in the air, startled by his sudden appearance before laughing weakly, shifting my weight back and forth as I hold the bag out like my last salvation. A chum bucket. Great Whites go for them because they’re easier than gnawing on human flesh. Here’s hoping. “I, uh... I brought lunch. Thought you might be hungry.”  
  
There’s a tense, scary moment where he keeps giving me the same murderous look, but then it softens just the tiniest bit, giving way to a skeptical raised eyebrow. “What’s in the bag?”  
  
Well, goddamn. Peace offerings. Patrick knows what the hell he’s talking about. “Um, there’s chicken pot pie, biscuits and gravy, coleslaw, and a glass of homemade iced tea.”  
  
Another skeptical look. “Is it sweet tea?”  
  
“I watched the lady put enough sugar in it to send a small mammal into a coma, yeah.”  
  
As if that’s all he needed to know, the rest of Ryan’s body emerges from beneath the Mustang, rolling into visibility on a rickety old glider like you see in old-school racing movies. He’s changed clothes since this morning, must have gotten fresh ones out of the trunk. The skinny jeans and v-neck he’d been wearing before have been swapped out for a faded, torn pair of Wranglers and a white crew neck t-shirt, both of which are covered with splashes of motor oil. Ryan’s skin didn’t escape whatever incident ruined his clothes, either. There are spots of black smeared along his cheekbones, and as he gets to his feet with a groan I can see where he’s clearly been up to his elbows in the stuff, grabbing a rag pulled through the belt loop of his jeans and wiping the worst of it from his hands. His hair’s a mess, hanging in his face, but he has to make do with shaking his head in an attempt to deal with it as he darts forward and snatches the bag from my grasp, inspecting its contents before looking at me with a grudging sort of acceptance. “You went to Mabel’s?”  
  
“Patrick said you liked the food.” But before I can explain any further, Ryan’s already sitting on the hood of the car, digging into the biscuits and gravy with a plastic fork and making an obscenely satisfied noise at the first mouthful.  
  
“Jesus, that lady can cook. Her talents’re wasted in Chicago, I’m tellin’ you,” he mumbles, grabbing the to-go cup of tea from my hand and taking a massive swig of it as well. Make a note for future reference, I tell myself. Ryan’s wrath can be quelled with high-cholesterol food and ridiculously sugary beverages.  
  
I laugh and nod along even though I think sweet tea is a ridiculous concept and I’ve never really liked chicken pot pie, shoving my hands in my pockets and nodding down at the Mustang, as radiant and polished as ever. “Something wrong with the car?”  
  
Ryan shakes his head sharply, already done with the biscuits and starting in on the coleslaw. “Tune-up. She needs one every few thousand miles. I just changed the oil; I was in the middle of checkin’ out the undercarriage when you got here.”  
  
“Oh. Okay.” There’s another long stretch of silence broken only by the sound of the bag rustling as Ryan digs around in it. He’s still not making eye contact with me, but he’s at least tolerating my presence, which I take as a now-or-never sort of cue. “Hey, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”  
  
Ryan tenses up, his gaze boring a hole in the floor at my feet. He bundles what’s left of his lunch up in the bag and tosses it across the garage into the trash can, heaving a heavy sigh as he turns away to go dig around in a dented metal toolbox sitting on the workbench next to the stereo. “Don’t worry about it.”  
  
And there go the his walls again, rising up to the sky and into the clouds. I’m left standing at the bottom with nothing but a cheap lunch and genuine contrition as my grappling hook, wondering how the hell I’m ever going to make it over. “No, okay, cut the bullshit and let me apologize. You’ve been really shitty to me all week and I don’t feel bad for calling you out on it, but...” I pause, staring at my feet and trying to figure out a way to phrase it without breaking the unwritten rule of bringing up the pretty girl from the picture in his wallet. “But some of the stuff I said was hitting below the belt. I’ve got better things to put my energy into than hating you, Ryan, and I think you’ve got better things to put your energy into than hating me. I’m not trying to say that we should hold hands and sing Kum Bah Yah or something, but I don’t want us to be at each other’s throats all the time. And the thing that happened at the Williams place, I get that it doesn’t mean anything, okay? I guess it just freaked me out a little but I don’t want you to think that I-”  
  
“Brendon.”  
  
I wasn’t aware of how fast I’d been talking, lungs starved for oxygen as I rambled pointlessly. My view of the cement flooring is interrupted by the appearance of Ryan’s shoes, my stream of consciousness cutting off in the wake of callused fingers pressing beneath my chin and tilting my head upwards. He’s in my personal space, but there’s nothing malicious about it. In fact, if it weren’t Ryan, the closeness could almost be intimate. I can feel where the spot of motor oil will be smeared onto my skin later. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t offer any sort of absolution. I didn’t think he would. Ryan doesn’t seem like the ‘apology accepted’ type. But there’s no more anger in his eyes, a little less tension etched into his features. His walls are still miles high, but they’re no longer crowned with razor wire and watchtowers. This is the closest I’ll ever get to forgiveness from him, the absent brush of his thumb along my jaw and a quiet, pensive “Thank you.”  
  
It’ll do. I smile softly, leaning against the front bumper as he steps away and folds himself back under the car. “I thought I was on your shit list forever or something.”  
  
“You’re on my shit list most of the time. But you have your moments of decency,” Ryan’s voice rises up from the undercarriage, just the slightest bit of mischief laced into its usual flat baritone. “I’ll consider this one of ‘em if you’ll hand me that socket wrench from off the workbench and turn the stereo back on before you leave.”  
  
I do as he asks and head back inside, knowing when my welcome’s worn out. Patrick said that working on the car was Ryan’s therapy, and I hadn’t really understood what he meant at first. But just before I close the door behind me, I can hear him singing along animatedly to Back In Black from somewhere inside the Mustang’s mechanical guts, and I start to get it. I tried to fix things with words, and now it feels like there’s a huge weight off my chest. Maybe Ryan’s approach is a little simpler, fixing things with his hands in place of trying to mend the parts of himself that will probably always be broken. I wonder if there’s anything to that. As I walk back the hallway, I make a mental note to ask him to teach me about cars.  
  
Because despite what I want to think, we do have common ground, Ryan and I. And even if I can’t mend myself, it might be nice to know how to fix something else.

 

* * *

  
“I’d say you’re forgiven,” Patrick hums sagely, turning another page in his book before hopping up to go scribble a few more notes on a diagram tacked to the wall. I can’t make much sense of it anymore, so I’ve given up trying to follow his train of thought when it comes to my case. Instead I just sit in one of the armchairs and watch him whiz around like some sort of genius hummingbird, musing absently about the incident with Ryan while he juggles ten other things. “If he asked you to help him work on the car, that was a gesture of friendship.”  
  
“He... asked me to hand him a wrench.”  
  
“Still counts. Ryan’s esteem of a person can be judged by the proximity he allows them to that car. If he trusts you, you’re allowed to sit in it. If he likes you, you can ride shotgun. If you’re friends, he might ask you to help him work on it, even in the capacity of you handing him a wrench.”  
  
I laugh at the utter ridiculousness of that formula, grabbing a fresh-looking case file off the top of Patrick’s desk and scanning over it arbitrarily, something about a Werewolf in the greater Chicago area. “What, is he in love with you if he lets you drive?”  
  
Patrick looks at me with a deadly serious expression. “It’ll be a cold day in Hell before Ryan Ross ever lets someone touch the steering wheel of his baby. That’s an irrefutable fact.”  
  
Raising an eyebrow, I decide to drop the subject, flipping through the pages of the case file and leaving Patrick to his thoughts until Ryan walks in a few minutes later, sweaty and covered head to toe in motor oil but looking generally more amiable than he has in days. Mechanical therapy. Who’d have thunk it? He walks over and leans on Patrick’s desk, peering at the notes scattered over the surface before looking around the room. “Pete in his office?”  
  
“Huh?” Patrick says absently, looking up and finally noticing his presence. “Oh, yeah. He’s being the FBI for William right now, though, so don’t bother him. He said to tell you that you need to get that case taken care of tonight.”  
  
Ryan frowns deeply, turning away and seeming suddenly interested in something on display in one of the cabinets. “Tell Jon to do it. I just... I’ve had a rough day, Patrick. I don’t want to add that to it.”  
  
“Jon’s on his way to Michigan to take care of a poltergeist.”  
  
“Andy and Joe, then.”  
  
“En route to Florida. Somebody set a Tulpa loose in Epcot.”  
  
“Gerard?”  
  
“Haven’t heard from him since he left for Oklahoma City. He’s MIA. Mikey and that whole crew are down there looking for him.”  
  
“Fuck, there’s gotta be  _someone._  Kellin, Jenna, Sisky,  _anyone._ ” There’s a faint look of desperation on Ryan’s face, and it’s unsettling. I’ve seen a range of emotions that he can exhibit, but to my knowledge, plaintive has never been one of them.  
  
Patrick looks at him wearily, putting his pen down with an emphatic click and sighing. “Kellin’s on an indefinite sabbatical after what happened to Justin, Jenna got ripped apart by a pack of Skinwalkers three months ago, and you know how Sisky is with Werewolves. I’m sorry, Ry. If we’d have known how it was going to play out, we wouldn’t have put you on the case.”  
  
“Dan?” Ryan asks weakly, a last-ditch effort.  
  
“ _Ryan._ Take a step back and look at your objective. The full moon’s tonight. If you don’t act now, we’ll have to wait a whole month, and endgame, more people will end up dead. Do you want that blood on your hands?” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Patrick speak so sharply, although there isn’t really any sort of anger in his voice. In fact, it almost sounds like a certain brand of tough love. Makes sense. It’s probably the only sort of motivation Ryan will respond to. “It’s not a good situation for anyone involved, man. But the best thing you can do with the hand you’ve been dealt is to take care of this thing while you have the opportunity. I know you get invested in this sort of thing but-”  
  
“I’m not invested. Do I look like a fuckin’ amateur?!”  
  
The sudden, deep sadness that skates across Patrick’s face unnerves me, and I’m once again struck by the annoying sensation of not knowing nearly enough of the story. “No. You look like someone who has a conscience. That’s not a bad thing, but I know it makes the job hard for you. I’m really sorry, Ryan, but our hands are tied.”  
  
After a long silence, Ryan sighs, running a dirty hand through his equally dirty hair. “All right, I’ll handle it. Just let me shower and get ready.”  
  
“Handle what?” I finally say, fed up with being kept out of the loop, but Ryan’s already gone, disappeared up the stairs with a sharp slam of the door.  
  
Patrick nods at the case file in my hand, picking up his pen and going back to his notes again. “There’s been a Werewolf loose downtown. Five bodies in three months, all mauled and missing their hearts. It’s someone new to the area, has to be. Jon cleared out the last Werewolf in Chicago years ago. Ryan’s been trailing it the past few nights.”  
  
Yeah, when he’s not busy getting drunk and fucking random strangers, I think bitterly, still dwelling on the smell of dollar-store cologne that followed him into the kitchen this morning. “Oh. And he needs to kill it tonight? What’s the problem?”  
  
“The problem is Ryan’s moral compass. Killing a werewolf’s different from killing a Wendigo or something of the same ilk. Werewolves, Vampires, things like that... they didn’t choose to be what they are. They were all born human. Ryan has trouble reconciling that former humanity with the fact that killing them will save countless more lives.”  
  
I feel kind of stupid for not having a response to that, other than a sluggish, uncertain question. “Ryan has a moral compass?”  
  
Patrick laughs, flipping through a massive, ancient-looking volume spread out across his desk. “You two should stop sniping at each other long enough to have a real conversation. There are a lot of things about Ryan that would surprise you. Now skedaddle, I need my thinking space. I feel like I’m close to a breakthrough.”  
  
I retreat from the library without another word, heading upstairs with infinite echoes from the past few hours playing on loop in my head.  
  
 _Don’t feel special. He’s an asshole to everyone.  
  
Brendon. Thank you.  
  
There are a lot of things about Ryan that would surprise you..._  
  
Yeah. I bet there are.  
  
He’s walking out of the bathroom by the time I make it to the top of the stairs, damp hair plastered to his head and a towel around his waist. No more motor oil or dirt, but also no more of that brief levity that he’d had before Patrick shot it all to hell, a weary slump to his shoulders and something heavy weighing down his stride. My attention flickers inexplicably to the museum of scars carved into his torso again, noting how the gash he got from the Wendigo has faded into no more than a pinkish-red line that disappears into the rumpled folds of the towel. I blink hurriedly and try to become engrossed in one of the framed band posters decorating the living room wall. Ryan’s not buying it.  
  
“Soak it all in, Urie, you get a thirty-second preview before I start chargin’ a fee,” he smirks, kicking the bathroom door shut behind him, but there’s not as much playfulness in his voice as there could be. Despite everything, he sounds sad.  
  
“There you go with that flattering yourself again,” I reply, hoping the banter will cheer him up a bit. “If I want to look at stick insects, I can see them for free on Animal Planet.”  
  
Ryan snorts and disappears into the guest room, emerging a minute later in a fresh pair of jeans and yet another shirt from his seemingly infinite collection of plaid flannel, rubbing at his hair with the towel as he walks over to join me. “Fuck  _me,_  I need sleep. I took a cat nap standin’ up in the shower and almost busted my ass.”  
  
“Yeah, sucks about you having to go back out,” I mumble, looking at him and trying to place something behind his impassive expression before adding a stronger, more confident addition of “I’m coming with you.”  
  
“The hell you are.” His voice is flat, final, leaving no room for an argument. I tell his implications to go fuck themselves and  _make_ room for an argument.  
  
“I am. I can help. Pete’s taught me a ton of stuff this week, and you’re always the one saying I need practice,” I reply, crossing my arms and raising an eyebrow at him. “And I mean, it’ll be easier if you don’t have to go it alone. You seemed kind of upset back there and-”  
  
“I wasn’t upset,” Ryan hisses defensively, eyes hardening. “I ain’t got time for that bullshit, kid. This life? No room for sentiment. We kill things. It’s what we do. You hesitate, and you die. The only thing I’m  _upset_  about is havin’ to go back out there when all I want is forty winks and a day off. I’m fine. You’re not comin’, Brendon. That’s final.”

 

* * *

  
“He’s going with you. That’s final,” Pete says boredly, not looking up from the map spread across his desk. It’s a huge, laminated highway map of the US, with little dots in several different colors of dry-erase marker drawn across it. Next to the dots there are names and dates that I barely manage to make out from where I’m standing, a messy scrawl of ‘Andy/Joe - Tulpa’ over Orlando, ‘Sam/Dean - Last seen Dec. 17’ over the middle of Ohio, and something that looks like ‘Kellin - Riverview Psychiatric Hospital’ as a footnote near a little town in Vermont. This is Pete’s game plan, I realize, all of his little toy soldiers marked in their place on the battlefield. Frowning, he grabs a tissue from a half-empty box on the far end of the desk and rubs ‘Gerard - Vetala - MIA (?)’ out of existence from the area of Oklahoma City before sparing Ryan, who’s silently fuming by this point, a sidelong glance. “He needs a trial run. Knowledge won’t do him any good without practice.”  
  
“And you want to make  _this_  case his trial run?” Ryan seethes, acting like I’m not even here (what else is new?) as he slams both palms down on Pete’s desk and fixes him with a vicious, somewhat disgusted glare. “I’m all for the concept of new hunters gettin’ their first blood, Pete, but this is just cruel. I didn’t peg you for a sadist.”  
  
“Do you think what’s out there coming for him is going to leave room for him to slip up?!” Pete snaps back, rising out of his chair and mirroring Ryan’s posture, seeming larger than life even though he’s shorter than I am. “Now’s not the time for you to get a bleeding heart. Patrick hasn’t cracked what that thing is yet, but the extent of our knowledge so far is that it’s one bad son of a bitch. Brendon’s not going to benefit from you coddling him. If you haven’t noticed yet, Ryan, the people you try to protect have a nasty habit of ending up dead.”  
  
For a little, bookish guy with only one hand, Patrick shows a surprising amount of agility, grabbing Ryan around the waist before he can lunge across the desk and kill Pete with his bare hands. For a few seconds the room is full of furniture scuffling and Ryan cursing and Patrick yelling “Really, Pete?!  _Really?!_ ” until it all builds up to a deafening roar in my head, the sounds morphing illogically into familiar screams and the sound of everything I loved being ripped apart.  
  
“EVERYONE SHUT UP!” I shout, completely shocked when they all listen to me for once. Even Ryan in all his blind rage deflates, going limp in Patrick’s hold and looking at me strangely. It’s only then that I realize how odd I look, hands clapped over my ears and spine curled inwards like I’m trying to fold myself up into nonexistence, hiding from the nameless threat out there somewhere in the world. I suck in a few ragged breaths, fists clenching as my own indignation blooms in the center of my chest. “I’m twenty-fucking-one years old! Can we stop with the custody battle?! I’ll make my own goddamn decisions! If I want to go with Ryan, which I do, then I’ll go, but not because of anything anyone has to say about it!”  
  
I’m met with stunned silence, which only serves to make me even angrier. Growling, I grab Ryan by the arm and yank him towards the door, not even bothering to look at the dumbfounded expressions on Pete and Patrick’s faces. “Come on, Ross, we’re leaving.”  
  
He doesn’t say anything until we’re in the car headed up the road, his eyes fixed straight ahead and his grip white-knuckled on the wheel. “I shouldn’t have lost it like that. And I shouldn’t have been talkin’ like you didn’t have a say in the matter. I was just-”  
  
“You were just functioning in your normal, self-involved state. Trust me, I get it,” I snap, a bitter taste in my mouth.  
  
“I was only thinkin’ of you, so stop actin’ like such an ass,” Ryan retorts, weaving in and out of traffic as we move further into the seedy part of Chicago. The sun’s been down for hours, the yellow halo of the streetlights casting the Mustang’s interior in an odd sort of glow. “This ain’t the kind of material you want to deal with on your first case. It’s gonna fuck you up, kid.”  
  
I know it’s the situation I should be angry with, not him, but that doesn’t stop me from barking out a cold, humorless laugh, watching the cars around us whiz by and life going on in a way I can’t even fathom anymore. “I watched my entire family die, Ryan. It’s a bit late to try and prevent me from being fucked up.”  
  
“I know,” he says softly, pulling up in front of a rundown old house with peeling paint and a saggy foundation, pulling the key out of the ignition with a slight frown. “Pete was right on that front, at least. Me tryin’ to protect people never ends too well.”  
  
“What is this place?” I ask, wanting to change the subject so I don’t have to look at the thinly-veiled hurt in his eyes anymore. Ryan isn’t making a move to get out of the car, just sitting in the driver’s seat and watching the front door with a quiet sort of resignation.  
  
“It’s a group foster home,” he answers after a long time, toying absently with his keychain and sighing. “The kids that the system can’t find a home for end up in places like this. The parents get paid per kid, but it’s not really enough to give ‘em a decent life. They’re pretty miserable places. There’s eight kids that live in this one.”  
  
“We’re hunting a Werewolf at a foster home?” I ask, confused.  
  
Ryan grimaces, reaching into the glove compartment to pull out his handgun and a box of ammunition. He doesn’t look at me at all as he pops the magazine out and starts loading it up with silver bullets, stiff, mechanical. “Yeah.” Click. “Wait for the moon to come out.” Click. Click. “Then you’ll see what I was talkin’ about.” Click.  
  
There’s a worn old duffel bag on the floorboard of my side of the car, and when I unzip it, it’s filled with more boxes of silver bullets, the Glock he taught me to shoot with, and two weird-looking contraptions that I can’t identify.  
  
“Silencers. Homemade, but they get the job done,” Ryan explains, grabbing one of them and rigging it up to his gun. “Gunshots in Chicago ain’t hard to come by, but I’d rather not cause a scene.”  
  
The harrowing reality that he’s going to shoot something - some _body_  - in the middle of a crowded city finally hits home, sinking like an icy weight in my stomach as I mimic his actions, loading up my own weapon and holding it steady as Ryan fits the silencer onto it. It’s a whole different paradigm, knowing that I’m going to be aiming at something that lives and breathes and bleeds instead of a harmless outline on a paper target. I feel suddenly ill.  
  
We sit in expectant silence for an hour, maybe more. It’s well past midnight before anything happens, a blur flying out of one of the upstairs windows and landing soundlessly on the pavement of the alley that runs alongside the house. My head snaps up, jaw dropping. “What the hell was that?”  
  
“Look,” Ryan says tersely.  
  
He was only thinking of me. This isn’t the kind of material I want to deal with on my first case. It’s going to fuck me up. Crouched in the alley, barely caught by the light of the guttering porch light is a kid, maybe eleven or twelve years old. Or at least, it used to be a kid. In the brief flash of stillness before he turns and disappears into the alley, I can see how his nails have elongated into claws, how his eyes flash silver. The sharp burn of bile rises in my throat. “Oh my God.”  
  
“His name’s Julian Markos.” Ryan’s voice is barely there, caught somewhere between a whisper and a mumble as he reaches down to undo his seatbelt. “He just turned twelve. Last year his parents died in a campin’ accident, got attacked by what the official story calls a mountain lion. He got bit pretty badly and couldn’t remember anything that happened, but walked away otherwise unscathed. No family to speak of, so he got put in the system. He got here three months ago. I think you can put the story together, Brendon. You’re smart.”  
  
“The thing that attacked his parents...” I want to go back to Pete and Patrick’s, pretend I’d never insisted on coming along. No, more than that. I want to go  _home._  I want my boring life and my bed and my brothers being assholes and my mom making family dinners on Saturday nights. I want anything but this. “It wasn’t a mountain lion.”  
  
“Yeah, good job,” he says blankly, turning to me with his fingers wrapped around the door handle. “D’you see why I wanted to keep you out of this?”  
  
He gets out of the car without another word and I follow him numbly, both of us fading into the shadows of the alley. I don’t know how he does it, but Ryan manages to follow the little Werewolf’s trail in total darkness, leading me through a confusing maze of back streets and access shafts until we’re left staring at a pair of glinting silver eyes fixed on us from a darkened corner.  
  
“He didn’t choose this,” Ryan whispers, sounding so broken that I’m eternally grateful that I can’t see his face. “Poor kid ain’t even aware of what he’s doin’. If we walk away now, he’ll wake up in his own room tomorrow mornin’ covered in blood with no idea how he got that way.”  
  
A growl rumbles outward from the shadows and the kid stalks out on all fours, fanged teeth bared. I can practically feel the weight radiating outwards from beside me as I hear Ryan click off the safety of his gun, waiting for the tipping point to come. “And it begs the question. Is a monster a monster if he doesn’t know it?”  
  
I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s the memory of Pete saying that knowledge is useless without practice. Maybe it’s the sadness in Ryan’s voice. Maybe it’s the panic when I see the thing that used to be a boy named Julian Markos lunge forward with a snarl.  
  
But whatever my reasoning is, my hand doesn’t even shake as I shove Ryan out of the way, hold my gun level, and shoot a little kid in the heart.  
  
I don’t have to see him slump to the ground, don’t have to see the light leave his eyes, because the instant after the gun kicks in my hand, I stumble to the edge of the alley and throw up. It’s a violent sort of illness that I’ve never experienced before, every cell of my body trying to reject what just happened, what I’ve just done. There’s nothing left for me to purge and still my stomach churns, a hideous, metallic taste stuck to the backs of my teeth that makes me gag every time I try to breathe, a hot wetness staining my cheeks that it takes me a few minutes to identify as tears, gasping in ragged sobs that wrack my whole body until I’m as useless and immobile as the corpse I’ve just created, curled in a blooming pool of blood a few yards away.  
  
“Brendon, come on.” A million miles away, a ghost of Ryan is grabbing at a ghost of my hand, trying to pull me away from the horror that has once again become my reality. I don’t move. I  _can’t_ move. All I can do is stand rooted to the spot, tremors wracking my limbs and the memory of what it was like to see all of my nieces and nephews in bloody ruin on the floor roaring through the fragmented remnants of my mind. Maybe this is how I’ll die, consumed from the inside-out with madness, the victim of a heart that no longer wants to beat.  
  
“Bren.” Fragile, spindly hands cradle my face with a gentleness that I would have never expected, providing a solid anchor as he leans down and presses his forehead against mine, our eyes locked through the haze of my crippling lapse of sanity. “Come back to me.”  
  
Just like that, I resurface. With a shudder, I fall out of my paralysis, unable to stand on my own anymore and collapsing against the only force holding me upright. Ryan says nothing for the longest time, just standing there and keeping me on my feet until my body remembers how to function again, the deep-amber flash of his eyes in the darkness the sole tether I can grasp at to pull myself back to the real world. I don’t know how long we’ve been there, minutes, hours, eternities, but eventually he lowers his hands until he’s grasping my shoulders firmly, still pointedly holding eye contact and speaking slowly, like one might to a child. “We need to move.”  
  
And okay, that’s okay, that’s fine. He says we need to move, so we’ll move. I follow him like an echo, a shadow, back through the twisting alleys in a weird sort of time-lapse until we’re standing back at the car. I look down, and there’s a spatter of blood on my shirt. I double over and throw up again, dry-heaving on the sidewalk until all of me aches and the only thing that feels real anymore is the steady solace of a hand pressed into the small of my back.  
  
He at least has the mercy to let me sit down and recover, drawing in ineffectual breaths and trying to find my place in a world with a tilted axis. Somewhere in the distance of my consciousness is the stale-sweet scent of Marlboro Reds, the same as what clung to the pillowcase at Pete and Patrick’s, and I latch onto it, let it carry me the rest of the way back into reality. When the world swims back into focus the first thing I see is Ryan staring at me, a half-burnt cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and his hand still pressed into my back like he was making an effort to hold me here, to make sure I didn’t slip away.  
  
Shakily, I stand up, reaching for the car door. “I’m fine. I’m okay. I’m fine.”  
  
“You, uh...” he starts uncertainly, digging in his jacket pocket and producing his keys. “You wanna drive? It always calms me down.”  
  
 _It’ll be a cold day in Hell before Ryan Ross ever lets someone touch the steering wheel of his baby. That’s an irrefutable fact._  
  
Nodding numbly, I accept the keys and fold myself into the driver’s seat, turning the ignition. There’s a sort of calming effect in the hum of the engine through the steering wheel, in the control I have as I turn the Mustang out into the road. Ryan was right.  
  
It’s quiet for a long time, nothing but our breathing and the steady drone of tires on pavement as I drive around, no real idea of where I’m going. I don’t know how to get back to Pete and Patrick’s. I don’t even think I  _want_  to go back there, back to the place where someone decided it would be in my best interests to send me out to murder a child. I drive in circles around the same block again and again, take random turns and lead us on a roundabout path out of Chicago’s urban center until we’re somehow back at the ramp onto an expressway. The silence is pushing me closer and closer to another bout of madness.  
  
“You didn’t have to. I could’ve done it,” Ryan finally says, toying with his iPod and watching me carefully as I slam on the brakes at a stoplight I nearly missed.  
  
“You said it yourself. There’s no room for sentiment,” I choke out in reply, futilely trying to still the shaking that rockets all the way down to the core of me. “We kill things. It’s what we do. And when I find that demon... thing, I can’t afford to hesitate. You coddling me isn’t going to do me any favors.”  
  
He looks at me silently, something that might be sadness flickering behind his eyes before it’s right back to that same impassive deadpan, taking everything in but giving nothing back. Finally, he turns away with a sigh, looking out the window as we drive away, away, away. Away from the bloody mess in the alley, away from the life I just ended, away from the last fractured pieces of my innocence scattered all over the road. But not away from the emptiness settling in my chest. If Ryan’s any indication, I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from that. “You’re right. Go ahead and hit the interstate. I found a case in Atlanta I wanna check out. Chicago's startin' to wear on me.”


	6. Chapter 5 - Ryan

 

 

 

 

As soon as we cross the Mason-Dixon Line, something in me that I hadn’t even known was tense relaxes.  
  
I’m leaning on the front bumper with a half-empty bottle of Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other, watching idly as Brendon walks around with the camera on his cell phone aimed in various directions. This is nothing, just a little monument on the side of the road in Preston County, West Virginia that officially means we’re back in the South, but it’s the first time I’ve seen him act like he’s actually alive since we left Chicago. We drove through the night in silence, him at the wheel and me feeling disproportionately antsy in the passenger seat, straight down I-70 with nothing but the hum of rubber on pavement and the occasional cough or flick of a lighter to interrupt the quiet. It wasn’t until the sun started to peek over the horizon that Brendon did something other than stare out at the road or reach down to shift gears, pulling over to the side of the road without a word and going into full-out tourist mode with the grimy, faded little stone monolith.  
  
“You ever learn about the Mason-Dixon Line in school?” I ask, trying to be conversational and only managing to be more awkward than I usually am when it comes to small talk.  
  
“Yeah,” he nods absently, snapping one last picture before pocketing his phone and turning to look at me. “It was the line that divided slave states from free states back in the Civil War, right? The border of the Confederacy?”  
  
“Good job, Poindexter,” I snort, pushing myself off the car and walking over to join him at the monument. “It’s been a hell of a long time since I crossed this line.”  
  
Brendon’s brow furrows in confusion, head tilted to the side. “But you said you’re from Alabama.”  
  
“I am. But I ain’t been back there in years. Made a habit of stayin’ out of the South for a long time. Been workin’ cases on Pete’s dispatch for four years, and he always puts me on stuff in the Midwest and New England.”  
  
Brendon fixes me with an oddly penetrating look, his sleep-shadowed eyes bottomlessly dark in the faint light. He looks at me like he knows the exact reason why I can’t go home, which is thankfully impossible. No one besides me knows what happened that night, knows what it was like washing her blood off my hands in the crummy motel bathroom and crying like a little kid when I rolled over in the middle of the night and smelled her perfume on the pillow next to mine. Maybe Brendon’s intuitive, but he can’t know details like that, the things I’ve shoved down so deep that even  _I_  can’t touch them. I stay out of the South because there are too many memories woven into the landscape, the ghosts of too many kisses and touches and promises I couldn’t keep hovering in the air. I run from the things I can’t fight, but Brendon has more to run from than I do. Maybe that’s why I decided it would be worth it to take him out of Chicago, away from the ghosts he just made for himself.  
  
They’ll follow him eventually, but until then, we can just keep running. Seeing the trademark deadness of a hunter behind his eyes gives me a deep, almost physical ache that I can’t explain. I’ll shoulder a few of my own old burdens if it will bring back the reassurance of his easy smiles. The world feels stilted and wrong without them.  
  
“So, uh... you okay now?” I ask somewhat gruffly, shuffling my feet. Watching me making an attempt at empathy and social norms is probably equivalent to watching an elephant trying to dance the tarantella.  
  
“I’m fine,” he says in a way that blatantly indicates he isn’t, but I let sleeping dogs lie for fear that they rear up and bite my head off. I’ve seen enough of Brendon when he’s pissed-off to last me a lifetime. Now all he seems to be is tired, a bone-deep weariness pulling down at his shoulders as he turns and shuffles back towards the car.  
  
I cut him off before he reaches the driver’s side, planting a hand on his shoulder and shaking my head. “Nuh-uh. You get back behind that wheel the way you are and we’ll end up in a ditch somewhere. I’ll drive, you sleep.”  
  
“Ryan, don’t-”  
  
“My car, my rules.” Scowling and standing with what I hope is a posture of finality, I dig around in my pocket and pull out another cigarette, wandering back towards the monument.  
  
"That shit'll kill you, you know," he says offhandedly, not scolding but not approving either.  
  
"I ain’t gonna live long enough to get lung cancer," I laugh in a way that’s caught between bitterness and genuine humor, blowing a smoke ring in his direction. "You don't ever see any old hunters for a reason."  
  
"But why start in the first place? I never understood it."  
  
I frown contemplatively out into the misty West Virginia sunrise, my tongue trying to wrap its way around the chemical cocktail falling into my lungs and a justification I've never been able to articulate. While my last statement should be a sad one, I manage to find a warped sort of romanticism in it. There’s that siren song of ruination again, calling me from the depths and just waiting for me to throw myself down. I’ve always been the most at home standing on the edge of oblivion, tip-toeing the line and wondering when something’s going to come along and push me over. In the end, maybe it’s a control thing. When the inevitable moment of my death comes, I will have no power over whatever horrible creature is causing it, won’t have any say as it rips my guts out or drains my blood. But I’m in control of the little paper cylinder between my fingers; I decide to bring it up to my lips and take a drag, decide to hold it until my lungs burn before breathing a cloud of toxins out into the air. I stopped being scared of dying a long time ago. Loss of control is a much more rational fear, and this is how I cope, breathing in death because I choose to do it.  
  
I never asked anyone to call me sane.  
  
"There's a sort of power in doin' something you know'll kill you,” I finally say, grinding the half-burnt Marlboro out under the heel of my boot and reaching for the car door. “Self-destruction's kinda poetic like that."  
  
Brendon doesn’t have anything else to say on the matter as I start the engine and pull back out onto the pothole-ridden highway, prodding arbitrarily at my iPod until some random Iron & Wine song starts filtering through the speakers. Quiet, relaxing, good music to sleep to. Brendon doesn’t, however, staring blankly ahead at the road as I steer us through innumerable tiny towns and sprawling stretches of nothing but mountains and trees.  
  
“Dude, seriously. Sleep,” I snap at him after a few hours, cruising past the exit sign for Summersville and debating on pulling off to grab something to eat. “You ain’t had a wink in over twenty-four hours and you’re no use to me if you’re a walkin’ zombie.”  
  
“You haven’t slept either,” he sighs wearily, too exhausted to even have any bite to his voice.  
  
“Yeah, but I got twenty-four years of experience with sleep deprivation,” I tell him, not unkindly, just an observation. I peel off on the exit to Summersville at the last second, rumbling over the uneven pavement and out onto some back road that leads into a minuscule excuse for a town. There’s a gas station, a few houses, a little mom and pop grocery store, and a dingy McDonald’s hovering like an urban triumph over it all. It reminds me of my hometown. “I can go three days on a two-hour cat nap. You can’t. Now, I’m gonna get you something to eat, and then we’re gettin’ back up on the road, and you’re gonna sleep until we cross the Georgia border or so help me, Brendon, I’ll kick your ass.”  
  
More silence. I go through the drive-thru and we sit in the parking lot with our admittedly pretty disgusting burgers, choking them down because both our stomachs had been growling beforehand. After what seems like an eternity, Brendon finally turns to me, and the look in his eyes is so hollow that I can’t stand to meet his gaze for more than a few seconds. “What if I can’t sleep?”  
  
I sigh, wadding up the paper bag and reaching into the back seat, fumbling through the duffel bag stashed in the floorboard on the driver’s side. In a few seconds’ time I manage to come up with a small orange pill bottle with a prescription for Patrick Stump on it, tossing it to Brendon, who’s so sluggish with fatigue that he doesn’t catch it and just lets it fall into his lap. “What?”  
  
“Whether you can’t sleep or don’t wanna sleep, that’ll fix your problems.” I pull out of the parking lot, determinedly not looking at him as he struggles through the logic process.  
  
“What... Ryan, why do you have a bottle of extra-strength Ambien prescribed to Patrick?”  
  
“Because I know what it’s like, okay?!” I half-shout, doing twenty over the speed limit as I head back towards the interstate. “The weight of all the shit you see, the guilt, the nightmares. Hell, kid, why do you think I’ve taught myself to go days without sleep?! I hate it! Only way I can catch a solid eight hours is by knockin’ back a handful of those things, so Patrick gets ‘em for me. End of story.”  
  
I’m not looking at his face, but in my peripheral vision I can see his thumb brush thoughtfully along the prescription’s printed label. “What have you seen that-”  
  
“ _End of story, Brendon._  Now take the goddamn pills and pass out so I can have a few fuckin’ hours of peace and quiet.” There must be something in my voice that doesn’t leave room for argument, because after a second’s pause he opens the bottle, shakes two tablets out into his palm, and swallows them with the last sip of his drink. And then the silence falls again. There’s something heavy in it, some unspoken loose end as I pull back up onto the highway. Frowning, I turn over to him and watch the pills starting to take effect, pulling downwards at his eyelids and making his grip on the bottle go slack. “I wish I could tell you it gets easier. I really do. But I’m not gonna lie to you, Bren. You might wanna start learnin’ how to make do with no sleep. Those nightmares don’t go anywhere.”  
  
There’s that little nickname again. I don’t know where it came from, only know that it felt natural as I hooked my thumbs into the hinges of his jaw last night and tried to pull him out of whatever place he’d gone to that I couldn’t reach.  _Bren. Come back to me._  Nothing really scares me anymore, but seeing him look so gone sent a blade of ice down my spine. As the engine hums up through the steering wheel and numbs my hands, I tell myself that it was only because I was scared of us getting caught, but something deep and not-so-effectively suppressed under my skin tells me a different story. The first time I met Brendon, he had this light about him, something I haven’t seen in ages that reeled me in despite my better judgement and got me invested into this Greek Tragedy of a situation. We would make a brilliant legend, he and I, the lost boy who shone like the sun and the cynical soldier who always found more in common with the dark side of the moon. As Brendon finally gives into the drugs and slumps unconscious into the corner of his seat, I know deep-down what it really was that made me panic when I saw his shaking hands and empty eyes.  
  
For some reason I can’t place, I am so, so terrified of his light going out.  


 

* * *

  
True to my prediction, Brendon doesn’t stir until we’re well over the Georgia state line, lunging out of the depths of some nightmare with a gasp after the pills have worn off enough to let him claw his way back to consciousness. He was out cold through the rest of West Virginia, Virginia, and half of North Carolina. The tossing and turning started right after we passed Charlotte, and the mumbling began as soon as we crossed the border into South Carolina. For both Brendon’s sake and mine I tried to tune it out - he deserves privacy with the things that haunt him, and being held a captive audience only served to make my own ghosts come out to play - but I could only turn the stereo up so far and not even my Iron Maiden Greatest Hits album could cover the plaintive calls for his mother, his father, other names that may have been brothers or sisters or lovers, hell if I know. Somewhere between Greenville and the Georgia border I began to wonder whether or not I talk in my sleep. There’s never anyone around to tell me other than on the occasions where I sleep at Pete and Patrick’s, and I don’t think either of them would have the balls to say anything about it if I did. If I do talk in my sleep, I know for a fact that my pleas are different than Brendon’s. It’s not my mother or father I’m calling for. Both of them have been gone for so long that the part of me that felt their loss is almost numb. I only ever wake up with one name on my lips, and even  _thinking_  it hurts.  
  
“You all right?” I ask even though I already know the answer, getting off on the next exit ramp and sparing Brendon a sidelong glance.  
  
“Hmm? Oh, yeah,” he mumbles, rubbing at his face and squinting out the window. “How long was I out?”  
  
“Somewhere around six hours, six and a half. We’re gettin’ off the exit to Atlanta right now.” The skyline rises up from over the highway, concrete monoliths poking up through a dense cloud of humid smog. I’m not a fan of big cities as a rule, but I’ve always liked Atlanta. The memories I have here are good, fifteen years old and still blind to the utter shitstorm of a life I had ahead of me.  
  
 _The house is so old and creaky that I almost don’t catch the telltale click of a bullet sliding into a chamber, whipping around and raising a skinny arm with fingers wrapped clumsily around a semi-auto pistol that’s too big for me. A cold circle of steel presses into my forehead, attached to a manicured hand and a pretty face, blonde hair in a no-nonsense ponytail and big brown eyes that might be reminiscent of a doe’s if they didn’t hold a murderous spark in them. “You trying to steal my case?”  
  
Gulping, I lower my gun and look down at the girl, about my age, maybe a year younger, her finger poised over the trigger of the Smith and Wesson that’s pressed against my frontal lobe. “Uh... is it a big deal? Ain’t a case gettin’ done more important than who does it?”  
  
“Spare me the philosophy lesson, bumpkin,” she smirks, lowering the gun and examining her nails, which I notice after a beat are tipped in silver. Clever girl. “Let’s just say that I like putting notches in my belt. Now get out of my way before I turn you into one of them.”  
  
“Hey, I been on this case for a week, don’t you go talkin’ down to me,” I seethe in an epitome of adolescent rage, a frown pulling at the corners of my mouth. “And I have a name. It’s-”_  
  
“Ryan?” Brendon’s voice pulls me out of my reverie. We’re at a stoplight in downtown Atlanta, traffic whizzing around us. I have no idea how we got here. My autopilot has taken us right into the middle of the urban sprawl, near the trendy section of town where all the upscale shops and nightclubs are. He looks at me with something that might be concern, fingers drumming absently in his lap. “Where are we going? You’ve been zoned out for like ten minutes.”  
  
“Huh? Yeah,” I mutter in a weird echo of Brendon after he resurfaced from his nightmare, flicking on my blinker signal and dodging down a side street. “Must’ve gotten the wrong exit for the motel. Maybe I need more sleep than I thought.”  
  
I’m not fooling anyone, especially him. Brendon keeps fixing me with that weird, see-right-through-you stare of his as we backtrack through town and end up in front of a seedy motel with the room numbers falling off the doors, the engine idling as I sit there and try to regain my grasp on reality. His hand settles on my shoulder and I jerk away from the contact instinctively, conditioned to avoid human touch and all the bonds it carries with it. A flash of hurt crosses his face but he pulls away nonetheless, swinging his door open with a dull mechanical click. “I’m gonna go check in. Just... I’ll be back.”  
  
He leaves, but I don’t notice. My eyes are trained straight out the windshield, across the dirty street. There’s a grungy diner there, half its neon lights burnt out and a layer of grime coating the entire place visibly. They make kickass milkshakes.  
  
 _“So you’re from out of town too?” she asks, digging into her half of a huge chocolate milkshake with a spoon, swiping the cherry from on top and popping it in her mouth with a look that dares me to challenge her.  
  
“Summerdale, Alabama,” I nod, nibbling at the crispy end of an overcooked french fry and watching her carefully. She’s one of those people that exudes confidence in a way I’ve never understood, an aura floating around her that makes her unapproachable but alluring at the same time. I have known her for five days, and she is the most confusing person I’ve ever met in my life.  
  
I like her.  
  
“I’m from LA. Haven’t been back there since I was little, though. Dad took me on the road after Mom died, and we kind of haven’t settled down since.”  
  
“Same.” Common courtesy would hold that I should offer her my condolences, but in this life you learn to skip the I’m sorry’s. Everyone’s lost someone, and if we took the time to acknowledge them all we’d never stop apologizing. “Y’all plannin’ on any other cases in the area? My old man and I could always use the help.”  
  
“I’m no one’s help,” she counters, but there’s no bite to it, the words delivered with a smirk and a hand darting over to grab one of my fries. “But I’ll give you my number before we roll out. I’d like to see you again.”  
  
“Assumin’ that neither of us gets torn to pieces before that can happen, yeah, I’d like that too.” It’s morbid, borderline macabre, but we both burst out into peals of laughter so loud that the other patrons turn around and give us dirty looks. We don’t care. I reach over and hold her hand under the grease-spotted table, and she lets me. The cold chill of the silver at her fingertips settles across my skin. It feels like home._  
  
Brendon raps on my window, and I jump about a foot off my seat. Cursing under my breath, I wriggle out of my seatbelt and clamber out onto the cracked blacktop of the parking lot, limbs screaming at me after hours stuck in the same position. He holds up a tarnished key on a dinky plastic fob like it’s some sort of trophy, and I roll my eyes, grabbing my duffel bag out of the back seat and following him to room 14, paint peeling off the door and the rusted metallic ‘1’ hanging upside-down courtesy of a missing screw. The door swings inward to reveal stained carpeting and two beds with garish comforters and lumpy, misshapen mattresses. I instantly feel a grief-stricken, longing ache for the Tempur Pedic in the guest room at Pete and Patrick’s.  
  
“So, you never told me what we were after.” Again with that look. I can practically feel him crawling around under my skin, and I hate it. Brendon backs off when I fix him with my deadliest glare, though, shying away and walking over to the bed on the far side of the room to unpack his stuff. He fumbles around under the collar of his shirt and pulls out the hex bag I made for him, setting it on the nightstand and starting to peel off the clothes he’s been wearing for two days. The bloodstained v-neck goes instantly into the trash can with a thump, the fabric’s absence giving way to pale, broad shoulders, the elegant curve of his spine, dimples set into his lower back just above the waistband of his jeans. It’s certainly not the first time this motel has seen clothes flying through the air.  
  
 _“That was a Ralph Lauren shirt, you ass,” she hisses, smacking my chest and giving a look of quiet lamentation to the buttons scattered all over the bedspread.  
  
I smirk into the hollow of her collarbone, thumbs digging into the thrumming pulse points of her wrists and pinning them on either side of her head. “Shoulda known better than to wear fancy clothes on a case. I usually end up tearin’ ‘em off afterwards.”  
  
“Because you’ve got a fetish for girls that can kick ass. Weirdo.” Her laughter gets lost somewhere over my head, lips trailing down her midsection and curving into a wicked smile when I feel the hitch in her breath. “We had our first date across the street from here. I just remembered.”  
  
“Milkshakes. You were wearin’ cutoffs and a red tank top.” It’s disturbing how well I can remember it, down to the smell of greasy food mixing with the sweeter scent of her shampoo. “Christ, were we ever fifteen?”  
  
“Oh yes, many moons ago. You’re sitting at the ripe age of twenty, Ry. You’re an old man.”  
  
“Don’t I know it. Before long I’ll have to get me one of them walkers with a bicycle horn on the front and I’ll be yellin’ at the damn neighborhood kids to get off my nonexistent lawn.”  
  
She laughs again and I can feel it beneath my lips, a pretty, musical sound that reminds me of bells. “You really know how to kill the mood.”  
  
“Do I?” I grin, sending more useless articles of clothing flying across the dimly-lit room. I think her underwear actually fly up and get hooked on the light fixture. That’s got to be worth bonus points.  
  
She goes to come up with some witty retort, but before she can formulate it her hands are clutching wildly at the sheets, spine arching off the creaky mattress. “Ryan-”_  
  
“Ryan!”  
  
I jump again, looking around in confusion until Brendon crosses back into my line of vision. When did he change into lounge pants and an oversized t-shirt? Weird. “Huh?”  
  
“Man, you must be really tired. I asked you a question five minutes ago.” Brendon shakes his head as he digs his laptop out of his backpack and flips it open. “Oh, free wi-fi, sweet. Anyway, you never said exactly what it is we’re hunting.”  
  
“Oh, uh,” I mutter, slumping down onto the edge of my bed and raking a hand through my hair. He’s right. I’m exhausted. I can feel the fatigue settling like a palpable weight in my bones. How did I not notice it until now? “It’s this thing called an Arachne. Big scary spider-human hybrid, impervious to everything except decapitation. Fun stuff.”  
  
Brendon raises an eyebrow at me, already opening up Google and starting a search. Patrick’s taught him well. “Never heard of them. I mean, ghosts and werewolves, that’s the stuff you hear about around campfires as a kid. The last thing I read about a giant spider was in Harry Potter.”  
  
“Yeah, well, they ain’t exactly common,” I groan, wriggling out of my jeans and trading my flannel button-up in for a worn old Metallica shirt. “They went off the radar for about two thousand years, and before that they were only on the island of Crete. But now we got ourselves an epidemic in the US. They infect with a bite, so the longer we let ‘em live, the more of ‘em we have to hunt down.”  
  
He blinks at me disbelievingly. “Care to tell me what caused an outbreak of ancient spider-monsters from Crete in the middle of North America?”  
  
“A stupid moose by the name of Sam Winchester,” I deadpan, pulling off my socks. Brendon looks confused, but he doesn’t press the issue, simply clicking away at his keyboard and keeping his gaze fixed on me as I move around the room getting ready for bed, dragging my duffel over and pulling the pill bottle out of the front pocket. “At any rate, the actual huntin’ part’s gonna have to wait ‘til tomorrow. I’m beat. You should sleep too, kid.”  
  
Brendon shakes his head, frowning at his laptop screen. “Nah. I slept all the way here. I’ll stay up for a bit and do some research on these things. You go ahead and hit the sack.”  
  
“Don’t gotta tell me twice,” I shrug, dry-swallowing three Ambien and collapsing into the musty-smelling pillow. I don’t even have to wait for the pills to kick in to make me go unconscious, the weight of my heavy heart and heavier memories pulling me into a fitful sleep.  
  
 _The smell of blood is everywhere, thick and coppery as it hangs in the air. I wasn’t fast enough. In the days and weeks and endless numbered years that will follow tonight, I will always have to walk through my life with the knowledge that this was my fault.  
  
Her blade snaps around in a silver blur and the last body crumples to the floor, an almost-graceful dance that I might find grotesquely beautiful if it weren’t for all the blood soaking her shirt, matting in the short-cropped locks of her hair and dripping from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are glazed as she turns sluggishly to face me. “Ryan, I...”  
  
And then she collapses.  
  
I barely manage to catch her before she hits the floor - finally fast enough, but far too late - lowering her gently to the crimson-stained concrete. My hands cradle her face, rivulets of blood sinking into the valleys of my fingerprints, the skin beneath my palms already far too pale and cold. “No. God, no, not like this. It’s not gonna end like this! We promised!”  
  
Her lips move soundlessly, a futile effort to wrap around formless words. A shaking hand comes up to rest against mine, and her eyelids flutter as those eyes, those big brown doe-eyes I fell in love with start to roll back in her head.  
  
“I'm so sorry, sweetheart,” I choke out, and it’s only then that I acknowledge the tears, burning salty tracks down my face and falling in pink droplets to further stain the ruined fabric of her shirt. She sputters for a moment, her eyes open and lucid for the briefest second as her other hand tightens into a fist in the fabric of my jacket.  
  
“Ryan, please.”  
  
I will never stop hearing those two words. Not for the rest of my life._  
  
I claw my way out from under the Ambien’s oppressive haze slowly, leaving the nightmare behind in favor of an amorphous blackness that wraps its way around my senses. Everything is muffled, but in the distance there are voices. I latch onto them and fight the rest of my battle for consciousness, cracking an eye open and peering around the motel room’s darkened interior.  
  
“I still feel awful.” Brendon’s back is to me, his spine curled inwards over the screen of his laptop as he perches on the other bed. His voice is a careful half-whisper breathed into the shitty built-in microphone on the computer, met with the pixellated image of Patrick’s face. My eyebrows furrow briefly in confusion before I remember that I’m supposed to be asleep and even out my expression to the best of my ability, squinting through the darkness to catch the rest of the conversation.  
  
“There was no way you could have known,” Patrick says placatingly, ruffling through something on his desk before reaching forward to poke at his keyboard. “Ryan’s a pro at suppressing his emotional trauma in incredibly unhealthy ways. It takes practice to read between the lines with him. Just remember to be gentle. He’s more fragile than he lets himself believe.”  
  
 _You bleeding-hearted, one-handed motherfucker, I’ll show you fragile,_  I think furiously, halfway to sitting up in my bed and giving Patrick a verbal beatdown that his grandchildren will still feel. But then Brendon shakes his head, clicks open one of his internet tabs and starts scrolling down through a long and boring-looking article. “Emotional trauma aside, start digging on that Greek mythos trail. I can’t believe we skipped over it before. There’s a whole gold mine of stuff here that we haven’t even considered.”  
  
“On it. Oh, and Brendon?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
Patrick smiles sadly on the screen, twirling a pen absently between his fingers. “Take care. And don’t beat yourself up about Ryan. The last thing he wants is your pity, trust me.”  
  
“I know, it’s just...” Brendon exhales heavily, his finger hovering over a button on the keyboard. “Right before I called you, he was talking in his sleep. I think he was calling for her. It’s sort of heartbreaking. Night, Patrick.”  
  
He shuts the laptop, and the room plunges into impenetrable absence of light. I blink numbly into the darkness, the sound of Brendon’s breathing echoing around the inside of my head.  
  
Well, there’s that mystery solved. I guess I do talk in my sleep.  


 

* * *

  
“Are you still doin’ research?” I ask disbelievingly, walking back into the room with my car keys in one hand and a huge take-out bag from Popeye’s in the the other. When I woke up in the late hours of this afternoon, Brendon was asleep at his laptop, snoring through me getting up and shuffling around. He was still out when I went to get dinner about half an hour ago, but since I left he’s gotten up and showered, now curled up on his bed with damp hair, clean jeans and a t-shirt with some high school mascot on it, typing away furiously. I shake my head with a disbelieving laugh. “You’ve spent too much time with Patrick.”  
  
If he catches the subtle hint that I overheard their conversation last night, he doesn’t show it. He only looks away from his computer long enough to grab the chicken sandwich I toss as him out of the air, taking a large bite and pointing at the screen. “Did you know that when an Arachne feeds, it-”  
  
“I know what they are, and I know how to kill ‘em. Any other information is irrelevant.”  
  
“That’s a really stupid way of looking at it,” Brendon frowns, sitting back against the headboard. “The whole ‘knowledge is power’ thing is legitimate.”  
  
“Yeah, thanks for that, Schoolhouse Rock,” I snort, snatching a cracked ashtray from off the windowsill and lighting up my umpteenth cigarette of the day. I’ve been on-edge since I rolled out of bed this morning. I’d thought that it would help me relax being back in my element, somewhere that my accent doesn’t turn heads and my colloquialisms are actually understood. So much for that. “Let me know when knowledge of Arachne feeding habits helps you chop one’s head off.”  
  
“Hey, Ryan, your ignorant douchebag is starting to show.”  
  
“Hey, Brendon, your stuck-up wannabe intellectual’s been showin’ since the day I met you. You don’t see me sayin’ anything about it.”  
  
“You say things about it on a constant basis.” Two days ago, these would have been fighting words. Now, for whatever reason, the banter is almost friendly, exchanged with wry smirks and followed by an easy silence. Brendon huffs and shuts his laptop with an emphatic click, wadding up his sandwich wrapper and flicking it at my head. “You can rag on my fact-finding mission all you want, but the fact remains that I’ve tracked the thing’s location down to a two-block radius.”  
  
I gape at him, cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. “You’re shittin’ me.”  
  
“I shit you not. Got the police records on the missing victims, marked the locations where they were last seen on a map. Midpoint for all of them is a large abandoned warehouse. Coincidence?” Brendon practically preens, fixing me with a scintillating grin and hopping off the bed. “So you and your negative opinions on extensive research can suck my well-informed di-”  
  
“Oh, _congratulations,_  you learned how to read a map. What do you want, a cookie?!” I snap, stubbing the cigarette out with unnecessary force and prowling over to look out the grimy window.  
  
It’s enough to finally get Brendon on the defensive, his metaphorical hackles rising as he whips around to fix me with a withering glare. “Who pissed in your cornflakes, Ross? Sorry, God forbid I actually do my  _job._  I don’t get it with you, I swear! First you get mad at me for not being experienced, then you get mad at me for making both our lives easier. What do you want?!”  
  
I want to crawl back into bed, swallow the rest of that bottle of Ambien, and not have to worry about anything for a very, very long time. But suicide’s always seemed too transparently cliche to me, and knowing my luck I’ve probably built up enough tolerance to the stuff to make overdosing an impossibility. So instead I just sigh, shoving my hands in my pockets and trying to look contrite when really, I’m closer to knocking Brendon’s teeth out than apologizing to him. Violence has always looked much better on me than guilt. “I... shit, I got no idea what’s goin’ on with me. I’m just edgy today. Must’ve not slept too well last night.”  
  
“Yeah, you...” Brendon starts, but he trails off almost instantaneously, eyes widening as he catches himself. That’s right, Urie. Be careful with me. Doctor Patrick says I’m  _fragile._  Don’t want to upset my delicate (nonexistent) mental balance.  
  
I don’t know whether I want to laugh or throw up.  
  
“I’m fine,” I say hurriedly, waving him off and starting to throw my stuff back into my duffel bag. “Let’s just find the thing and get this over with.”  
  
“You’re going to go after an Arachne wearing  _that?_ ” he asks with a half-condescending tone, gesturing at my jeans and faded old Cowboys jersey that’s about three sizes too big.  
  
“Hey, Brendon, your gay is startin’ to show.”  
  
“Oh, fuck off.” Scowling, he walks over to where his bag is sitting at the foot of the bed and yanks the zipper open, pulling out a handful of t-shirts. “I was talking about the  _practicality_  of your clothes, ass-hat. You’re really going to go chasing a poisonous monster with fangs in short sleeves?”  
  
“So I’ll wear a jacket,” I shrug, not seeing the point.  
  
“No, but I had an idea. C’mere.” After looking at him warily for a second, I finally give in and walk over to the rickety table in the corner, sitting down when he waves arbitrarily in the direction of the chair. Without another word, Brendon starts shredding the old shirts in his hands, tearing them into long strips of fabric. He frowns in concentration, grabbing me by the wrist and jerking my arm forward. I’m about to ask what the hell he thinks he’s doing, but then he takes the torn cotton and starts winding it tightly around my arm, starting where my shirt sleeve ends and layering the pieces all the way down to my wrists. “I saw some guy do it on Discovery Channel once. He was handling snakes. The fabric’s wound so tight that the fangs can’t get through without extra pressure.”  
  
Arching an eyebrow, I decide to test the theory. The Swiss Army knife in my pocket is always kept sharp. Maybe not as sharp as an Arachne’s fangs, but it’ll do. I flick the blade open and take a reasonably forceful jab at my arm, and while I can feel the pressure of the knife’s point pressing down, there’s no pain, no blood staining the shredded remnants of Brendon’s faded Doctor Who shirt. Letting out a low whistle, I slam the knife point-down into the table’s surface, holding my arm up to inspect his handiwork. “Well I’ll be goddamned. And you just thought of that out of the blue?”  
  
“Yeah? And?” He looks at me like he’s expecting an insult.  
  
“And nothin’. It’s just that you’ve had some really good ideas since I met you. For the moron you are most of the time, you’re actually really smart.” I realize too late that I’ve given him a compliment, and despite the fact that I try to cover it with a scowl, Brendon shines a little brighter, perking up in his seat. If I didn’t want to punch him in the face most of the time, it might actually be endearing.  
  
“I’m not Patrick by any means, but I did graduate valedictorian of my class,” he says with a self-effacing grin, pulling my other arm forward and starting to give it the same treatment with the fabric strips.  
  
For some reason, I laugh. “Step up from me. I never graduated at all.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Yeah. Goin’ to a different school every week or so never did wonders for my academic progress,” I snort, flexing my hands after he ties the wrappings off before looking up at him. “But I ain’t stupid. My mom always made sure that I did my share of studyin’. I’m probably just as well-read as you are, so don’t go climbin’ up on your high horse.”  
  
“I wasn’t going to. In fact, I was going to say that you didn’t strike me as a high school dropout.” I can’t tell if Brendon’s being genuine or just patronizing me, but I decide to give him the (very rare, from me at least) benefit of the doubt.  
  
“I can’t do Algebra worth a damn, but I know how to kill most anything that goes bump in the night,” I shrug, picking up the wad of unused fabric from the table. “It’s all about your priorities, I guess. Here, lemme get yours.”  
  
And maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, but I swear I can feel the brush of his fingertips along my arm even through the layers of cloth.  
  
We both end up wearing jackets anyway, my time-tested leather one zipped up halfway even though winter in Atlanta is downright balmy compared to what we were dealing with in Chicago. Brendon put on some weird dressy-looking one because it was all he had, mumbling that some protection was better than nothing before we got in the car. After that, we didn’t say much, nothing besides him giving me directions and me asking the occasional question about the validity of the reports he looked up. By the time we pull up in front of a warehouse that looks like something straight off the set of a horror movie, there’s a tension hovering in the air that’s almost tangible.  
  
“All right, sittin’ out here all night ain’t gonna get anything done,” I grumble, swinging open my door and climbing out into the darkened parking lot. Brendon follows after a beat in time, walking around to the back end of the Mustang as I pop the trunk open and pull up the false bottom, looking speculatively through the arsenal before grabbing a machete for myself and handing another weapon to Brendon with a sharp jerk of my arm.  
  
“Is this... Is this a fucking  _katana?_ ” he asks disbelievingly, taking the thing gingerly from my hand and squinting at it. “What, are you a samurai on top of everything else?”  
  
“Picked it up a few years ago dealin’ with an Okami in Atlantic City,” I explain gruffly, looping the leather sheath of my own blade through my belt and testing out the feel of the grip. “It’ll handle easier than the machete will, better balance, lighter. You don’t have enough experience with blades to go hackin’ away at things with a weapon you can’t control. Just be careful; that thing’s sharp enough to cut a man’s body clean in two with one stroke.”  
  
“Fair enough,” Brendon shrugs, swinging the thing a few times experimentally before looking back at me. “So do we have a game plan?”  
  
“Yeah. Game plan is we go in, find the thing, and cut off its head.”  
  
“But what if there’s more than one?”  
  
“Then we play it by ear, Bren, there ain’t a script for these things,” I groan exasperatedly, jerking my head in the direction of the door. “I’ll lead in, we’ll stick together, and we’ll pray that the thing was huntin’ down snacks and not potential mates. There’s your game plan. Now let’s go.”  
  
Brendon grumbles something unintelligible under his breath, but I don’t catch enough of it to justify getting pissed off at him as we approach the rusted old hull of a building. There are padlocks and chains on every door but one, which immediately puts up red flags for me. There’s  _something_  living in there, and the wreckage of the chains by the open door show that they were very obviously ripped apart by brute force. I’ve never seen a homeless guy who could do that. Either we’ve found the Hulk’s secret clubhouse, or there’s something very nasty behind that door. I raise a finger to my lips in a shushing motion, pulling the machete out of my belt with my other hand before reaching out to open the door. The motion is agonizingly slow, painstaking, every effort to keep the rusty hinges from creaking. I only open it enough to leave space for Brendon and I to squeeze through one at a time, shuffling into the darkness beyond.  
  
I damn near shit my pants.  
  
Everything in the warehouse is completely encased in thick, iridescent webs. Webs in the rafters, webs on the floor, a little web-cocoon in the corner that’s very obviously been broken out of. I go to move my feet, and there are webs clinging to my shoes. I can feel the color draining from my face. “Fuck  _me._ ”  
  
“What?” Brendon whispers, raising his sword arm a bit. “Did you see something?”  
  
“No,” I gulp.  
  
“Then why do you look like you’re a second away from puking?”  
  
“I... shit, man, I just really don’t like spiders, okay?!” Brendon has to bite down on his hand to muffle his laughter. I make a mental note to hit him later, glaring at him through the moonlight filtering in from the high windows. “Shut up! I got bit by a Brown Recluse when I was six and had to spend a week in the hospital. You’d hate the damn things too if you’d laid there and watched your arm swellin’ to the size of a small tree trunk.”  
  
Brendon keeps giggling, and I’m on the verge of kicking him in the shin when the smile falls from his face to be replaced with a look of terror, his arm rising to point behind me. “Oh fuck, it’s _huge._ ”  
  
I may or may not shriek like a four-year-old girl. I may or may not physically climb Brendon’s body in an effort to get away from whatever’s behind me, visions of a thousand-eyed monster swimming through my head. I may or may not have a minor heart attack that only calms down once I take the time to see that there’s absolutely nothing there, the fresh peals of Brendon’s laughter muffled in the fabric of my jacket.  
  
“You little shit,” I hiss, getting back to my feet and punching him in the arm, hard. Trying unsuccessfully to regain some semblance of my dignity, I brush myself off and stalk off further into the warehouse. “C’mon. I don’t think anybody’s home, but we still need to poke around a little.”  
  
I wade through more of the disgusting webbing, poking at the empty cocoon with the tip of my machete. “I’d say we’re dealin’ with a lone one. My bet is that this is its bed. What’s your research tell you on Arachne sleep habits?”  
  
Silence.  
  
“Brendon?” I turn around and he’s gone. “Dammit, this ain’t funny! Would you stop actin’ like such a dumbass and-”  
  
The impact smacks into my chest like a locomotive, knocking me onto my back before I have time to react. I’m left out of breath and blinking up at the ruin of what used to be a girl, a dancer’s build with long auburn hair that brushes my cheek as she leans down over me, grinning. Whatever she used to be, she’s not a girl now. Her eyes are solid white, interrupted only by empty black dots where the irises should be, the skin of her face mottled like she’s been splashed with acid, wicked needle-fangs in place of teeth that make her smile deadly. “Oh,” she breathes, trailing a finger down across my collar bone. “You’re pretty. I think I’ll keep you.”  
  
Yeah. No more of this ‘may or may not’ bullshit. I  _definitely_  shriek like a four-year-old girl.  
  
The Arachne darts her head downwards and my body kicks into its automatic defense response, dodging to the side and attempting to roll her off of me. But she was strong enough to pull those chains outside apart like a stray thread, and she’s strong enough to hold me in place, twisting the machete out of my grip and sending it skittering across the floor. In that moment I manage to slip out of her hold, weaponless but free, clambering to my feet and sprinting for the faint glimmer of the blade lost in the dark.  
  
She’s fast as well as strong, cutting off my path just before I get to where the machete landed and fixing me with a deadly smile. “Oh, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt. Much. And then we’ll have forever.”  
  
“Sorry, sugar, you ain’t my type,” I growl, making a last-ditch effort to duck around her. The rest happens in slow motion. Her hand settles in an iron vise around my wrist. I can’t tell whether it’s her or my own terror holding me in place. Fangs dripping venom sink through the leather of my jacket.  
  
And a flash of silver comes out of the nearest shadow, a faint red line blooming across her throat before her head and her body fall to the floor in separate pieces.  
  
“Yeah, I don’t think his label of ‘freewheeling pansexual’ applies to cross-species relationships. Bad luck, honey,” Brendon says breezily, stepping out from behind a web-shrouded pile of boxes. The blood dripping from the end of the blade is thick and viscous, the venom in it hissing and steaming against the concrete as it falls to the floor in blackish-red spatters.  
  
“You fuckin’  _idiot!_ ” I shout, my heart sounding out in loud, wet thumps against my ribcage. “She bit me. Mother of God, she  _bit me._ ”  
  
And I know how it’s going to have to go now. It’s a story I’m far too familiar with. The venom will start circulating through my veins, and I’ll start turning. And then Brendon will have to kill me. I’ve never given much thought to how I would die, but I never would have thought it’d be at the hands of a stupid kid from Vegas with nightmares to match my own and a smile that’s made me weaker than I’d like to admit from the get-go. The irony is almost humorous.  
  
Or at least it would be if I weren’t in such a blind panic, tearing off my jacket to look for the bite. Maybe it’s not too late to suck the venom out. Hell, maybe we could cut off my arm before it spreads. Patrick’s done all right for himself one-handed. I yank sharply at the strips of cloth that Brendon wrapped around my arm back at the motel, pulling them frantically away to reveal...  
  
Nothing.  
  
Jaw dropping, I brush the pads of my fingers along my unexpectedly pristine skin, searching out a bite mark that isn’t there. It’s the second time I’ve said it tonight. “Well I’ll be goddamned.”  
  
“Discovery Channel, man,” Brendon smiles breathlessly, grabbing the wad of fabric from me and using it to wipe down the blade of the sword. “It saves lives.”  
  
“No, you don’t get to claim you saved my ass when you almost got me turned into a... a  _thing!_ ” I snap, back to yelling within an instant as I grab him by the front of the shirt and yank him towards me, all boundless rage and murderous intent. “What the  _hell_  were you thinkin’, Brendon?! I said we were gonna stick together!”  
  
“But that plan didn’t make sense-”  
  
“The things we hunt don’t make sense, so why should we?!” I cut him off furiously, shoving him away and shaking my head. “Let me tell you something, kid. I’ve met a lot of really good people who were really bad hunters. And they all ended up dead because they tried to play by rules that don’t exist. The second you start applyin’ common logic to this job is the second you are royally _fucked,_  got it?! You’re missin’ the part where I’ve been at this for twenty-four years and you’ve been at it for a week and a half. I don’t care what you were valedictorian of. Out here, I’m the expert. I’m the authority, and if you just run off and ignore what I tell you, you’re gonna get one or both of us killed!”  
  
 _Killed, killed, killed_  echoes around the cavernous space of the warehouse, and each reverberation seems to etch its way deeper into the wounded look on Brendon’s face. I’m too angry to fall for it, still seething as he deflates and looks at the mess of blood and webbing all over the floor. “I’m sorry. I just thought...”  
  
“You thought wrong,” I snarl, stalking out the door and yanking the wraps off my other arm. Brendon pauses at the threshold, fixing me with his stupid penetrating stare, and I whip around to snap at him, “What?!”  
  
He’s quiet for a moment, mulling over what he really wants to say before thinking better of it and sighing resignedly. “What are we going to do about the body?”  
  
“Thing about spiderwebs,” I mumble, grabbing him by the arm and yanking him out of the doorway. There’s always a Zippo in my jacket pocket, in this case a dented one that I flick to life with an odd sort of fascination. “They’re highly flammable.”  
  
We drive away from the warehouse just as the flames start to shoot up to the sky, charring any evidence of our presence to ash.  


 

* * *

  
I’ve got some really loud, angry Van Halen blasting through the stereo as I head for the interstate that will take us back to Chicago, my decision already made that our little vacation is over. Brendon’s been silent for an hour, but he finally speaks up when we’re sitting at the stoplight next to the ramp. “I found us another case while I was researching last night. I figure Pete and Patrick need their space.”  
  
I should tell him no. I should tell him to shut up, that we’re going back to Chicago whether he likes it or not, that if he says another word between here and there I’m going to pop him right in the mouth. I sigh, pulling off into the shoulder. “Yeah? What is it?”  
  
“Weird missing persons stuff,” he starts off, opening up something on his phone to look up the information. “Some back-ass town called Summerdale, Alabama.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Ryan-”  
  
 _“No.”_  
  
“You’re being ridiculous-”  
  
“We’re not goin’, and that’s the end of it,” I snap, my grip around the steering wheel going white-knuckled. “I don’t care if half the population of Hell is throwin’ a rave downtown, we’re not goin’.”  
  
Brendon’s brow furrows, and just like that he’s staring right through me again. “You’re scared.”  
  
“I ain’t scared of nothin’.” Lies. All of it, lies.  
  
“Bullshit, Ross.” Brendon crosses his arms and stares me down, his head cocked to one side. “I’m not psychic, but it isn’t hard to tell when you’re hiding something. For a professional liar, you’re actually really bad when it matters.”  
  
“I’m from Summerdale, okay? There. Full disclosure.” Not by a long shot. I fumble through my jacket for a cigarette. The pack is empty. The entire world is out to fuck me up the ass with a cactus. “I just... I’m not goin’ back to Alabama, Brendon. Not now, not ever.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“That’s none of your goddamn business,” I reply venomously, not even caring when I can see the acid in my voice burning away at him. Brendon falters for a second, looking half hurt and half frightened, but then it’s back to that same infinite gaze, the one that sinks right down to the marrow of my bones, makes me feel bare and raw and far more vulnerable than I ever want to be. It’s like that for the longest time, a staring match. I hate to admit it, but I break first, slumping back in my seat with a shaky exhalation. “Four years ago, I made a really bad mistake. The last time I stepped foot in Alabama, I lost the one thing I ever gave a damn about, and it was all my fault. And you’re askin’ me to go back.”  
  
“Yeah. I am,” Brendon says flatly, a weird sort of sadness floating on top of his voice. “This whole thing so far has been all about me facing my demons or whatever, and all you ever do is act like you don’t have any skeletons in your closet when we both know it's not true. What are you so scared of?”  
  
My hands hover over the wheel, ready to nip the conversation in the bud and steer us on the fastest route to Chicago. I can’t do it. I curl into myself slightly, arms dropping until I’m staring at my palms, the backs of my hands brushing the denim of my jeans. “Memories. Ghosts.”  
  
“Well I’ve seen you kill a ghost, and I don’t think your memories are going anywhere.” His hand settles on my forearm, over the bruised place where the Arachne’s teeth should have pierced my skin. Despite all my yelling, his actions saved my life. Again. I’m struck by the heavy realization that I will never stop owing Brendon Urie. Never. Maybe it’s because of that obligation that I don’t pull away. I don’t want to think of the other possible explanations. I’m in deep enough as it is. Brendon smiles reassuringly, squeezing my arm briefly before letting go. I feel the absence of the touch more than I should. “It’s one case, Ry. What could go wrong?”  
  
“A veritable smorgasbord of shit,” I deadpan, pulling back onto the road and altering my course to take us up onto I-85 South. I’m going to regret this. I can feel it in every single particle of my being. Brendon smiles like I’ve just given him Christmas and his birthday combined. He messes around with my iPod until a familiar guitar riff floats throughout the car, settling like a funeral dirge over my consciousness. I turn slowly and fix him with a withering glare. “You’re pressin’ your luck, kid.”  
  
“Oh, lighten up, it’s appropriate,” he smirks, latching onto Lynyrd Skynrd’s vocals and singing along with the verse. Brendon’s got a beautiful voice, deep and rich, but the song puts a sense of cold dread in the pit of my stomach. “ _Big wheels keep on turnin’, carry me home to see my kin. Singin’ songs about the Southland..._  Come on, Ryan!”  
  
“Fuck off.”  
  
For every second of my silence, Brendon only cranks the volume louder, until the entire body of the Mustang is trembling with the vibrations of the speakers. The bass line shakes my skeleton and liquefies my insides. I have fallen apart. If Brendon sees it, he must choose not to acknowledge it, prodding me in the arm until I finally give up and whisper along softly to the chorus.  
  
 _“Sweet home Alabama, where the skies are so blue...”_  Nothing like singing the soundtrack to your own undoing. My memories. My ghosts.  _Ryan, please..._  
  
 _“Sweet home Alabama, Lord, I’m comin’ home to you.”_  
  
God help me, yes I am.


	7. Chapter 6 - Brendon

 

 

 

Ryan gets progressively more antsy the closer we get to Summerdale, Alabama, looking at every mile marker on I-87 like it’s another footstep closer to his grave. We stop at a gas station just across the state border, leave with a full tank, a bag of potato chips, and a whole carton of cigarettes. He’s chain-smoked his way through a pack and a half by the time we get to the exit sign for Summerdale. Those ten letters have a more profound effect on Ryan than anything I’ve ever seen, his entire body tightening up as he flicks on his blinker signal and pulls the Mustang onto the ramp. His unease might be funny if I couldn’t feel it, the tension in the air humming off-key to the Led Zeppelin album that’s been playing on repeat for hours.  
  
“You okay?” I ask.  
  
“No.”  
  
The conversation stops there.  
  
Summerdale is a minuscule town not too far from Mobile and close to the Gulf Coast, all quaint little buildings and pretty, green spaces. We drive past a manicured park with a whitewashed gazebo and a fire department that looks like it belongs on a postcard before eventually rolling into the parking lot of a little diner with ‘Vaughn’s Family Restaurant’ painted onto the sign out front, the engine idling for a few seconds before Ryan finally shuts the car off with a resigned sigh. I look over at him carefully, drumming my fingers against the door handle. “Okay. Explanation?”  
  
“Breakfast.” Ryan clambers out of the driver’s side without any more delay, pocketing his keys and grinding his cigarette out under his heel. I can smell bacon and fresh biscuits even from outside, and my stomach rumbles in response, reminding me of the fact that I haven’t eaten in nearly twelve hours. Ryan, for his part, looks like something other than a ticking time bomb for the first time since we left Atlanta, a vague almost-smile playing at the corners of his lips as he walks over and opens the door.  
  
The place gives off the vibe you might expect from a mom-and-pop diner in a small Southern town - bright blue walls, pictures of local high school football players hung up everywhere, vinyl tablecloths and rickety wooden chairs. The aroma of cooking breakfast food hits me like a wave as soon as I step over the threshold, and for a moment I’m too busy with my visceral longing for a cup of coffee to pay any attention to my surroundings.  
  
“Well, I’ll be. Ryan Ross!” A pretty girl with carefully curled, dyed-blonde hair and a sunny disposition walks out from behind the counter, wiping her hands on the apron tied around her tiny waist and grinning widely. “Ain’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”  
  
“You’re a sight for sore eyes yourself, Keltie,” Ryan nods, leaning over and pressing a quick kiss to her cheek before pulling back and offering his own smile, although it's markedly more tentative than hers. “Any idea where a guy can get his hands on some food around here?”  
  
“Maybe, yeah,” the waitress - whose name is apparently Keltie - beams, snatching one menu off the front counter and starting to walk off before she notices I even exist. “Oh, are you two together?”  
  
Ryan balks for a second, caught off guard, and I can almost see the lie spinning into formation behind his eyes. “Uh, yeah. This is Brendon. Distant cousin, from erm... Minnesota.”  
  
“Yeah, I’m from Lansing,” I throw in, trying to make it sound more convincing.  
  
“That’s in Michigan, you plebe,” Ryan hisses under his breath, stomping on my foot while Keltie has her back turned to straighten something on the counter.  
  
Laughing nervously, I tug my foot away and elbow him sharply in the ribs before she turns back around. “I mean, I was born in Lansing. Moved to Minnesota when I was in high school.”  
  
“Oh, that’s nice. It’s great to meet you,” Keltie smiles obliviously, sticking her hand out. For a skinny thing, she’s got a hell of a grip, practically crushing every one of my carpal bones with a simple handshake. I’m very clearly not the subject of her interest, though. She practically hovers around Ryan as she walks us to a table by the front window, folding herself into the chair next to him when we sit down and taking it upon herself to brush some of the dirt off the shoulder of his jacket. Everything about her screams  _clingy,_  and I’m not quite sure why that irritates me as much as it does. “Sakes alive, boy, where’ve you  _been?_  Ain’t heard a peep from you since your dad passed.”  
  
“I been... everywhere, sorta.” No, I’m not the only one who’s noticed it, then. Ryan looks distinctly uncomfortable, slowly scooting his chair closer to the wall. “Work keeps me on the road.”  
  
“Oh, you still officially on the whole starvin’ artist track?”  
  
“I won’t be starvin’ if you get me some breakfast.” I hear the frown in Ryan’s voice even if Keltie obviously doesn’t, laughing and pulling a notepad out of her apron. “I’ll have my usual, if you still remember. Brendon?”  
  
“Uh... I’ll just have a waffle and a side of bacon? Oh, and some coffee, extra creamer,” I mumble, not really looking at the menu in favor of looking at Keltie and putting as much  _go away, go away, please go away_  in my stare as I possibly can without being rude.  
  
She jots the order down on her notepad, finally, thankfully getting up from the chair with that million-watt grin of hers, which I’m starting to notice looks more than a little deranged. “All right, so the special number two for you, and for Ryan... grits, biscuits and sausage gravy, side of bacon extra-crispy, three hotcakes with molasses on the side, and coffee, black.”  
  
“Attagirl,” he nods, flicking through his phone arbitrarily. Keltie finally scurries off and he visibly slumps in his seat, bringing a hand up to rub tiredly across his face. “Jesus H. Christ.”  
  
“Did you two use to date or something?” I whisper, shooting a glance back to where Crazy Eyes McGee is relaying our order through the swinging door of the kitchen.  
  
Ryan fixes me with an absolutely venomous glare across the table, shoving his phone in his pocket and looking offended at the very idea. “She’s my neighbor... well,  _was_  my neighbor. When we were five years old, we got married in my backyard. Keltie’s teddy bear was the officiator. I think some part of her addled little noggin still considers it a bindin’ contract.”  
  
“Good thing it wasn’t. Wouldn’t want to be tied down to that. She seems like the type who’s all outwardly bubbly but then secretly has a stash of dead bodies in her basement,” I say, doing my best impression of the creepy grin.  
  
“Oh, leave her be.” An eye roll, a light snort, but there’s no real admonition behind it. In fact, I think I can see the beginnings of a laugh before Ryan stops himself, toying with the salt shaker and looking around the diner’s interior. “She’s a sweet girl. Just a little...”  
  
“Eerily obsessive?”  
  
And  _there’s_  the laugh, bursting in a thin baritone over his lips before he can stop it. “Yeah. Good assessment.”  
  
As nervous as he was the whole way here, Ryan almost seems relaxed now, like he’s back in his element for the first time in an eternity. Keltie brings our coffee and he actually, genuinely smiles at her, asks how her family’s been before she retreats back into the kitchen. I knew that Summerdale was a small town from my research, but I guess I didn’t understand the full scope of what that meant. Every single person (Every. Single. Person.) that walks through the door looks at Ryan like he’s some sort of prodigal son, makes a point to walk over and make conversation, and what’s even more surprising is that he doesn’t seem to mind. I’m quiet, barely noticed by the passerby, but Ryan smiles and laughs and drinks his coffee, talks to some guy in a NASCAR shirt and a trucker hat for a solid ten minutes about how the fishing down at the coast’s been since the oil spill. I remember Patrick saying to me that the Ryan I met in the woods, the Ryan I’ve always known, is very different from the one that he’d met five years ago. I’m starting to see him now, this other person, the one that still has all of my version of Ryan’s steel and grit but less of his prickly hostility and careful defenses. There’s a stupid, unwarranted warmth in my stomach. I tell myself it’s the coffee.  
  
Crazy Keltie reappears after a stretch of time, bearing a tray of food that looks and smells so heavenly that I decide to forgive her for her off-the-scale creep factor. But as pleased as I am, Ryan’s even more satisfied, groaning and clearly restraining himself from snatching the bowl of grits right off the tray. There’s enough food for three people in front of him, but after knowing him for a few weeks, I’m not surprised. I’m starting to think his stomach is actually a black hole. That’s the only way to explain his stick-insect figure relative to how much he eats without entirely disregarding the laws of physics. I’m already reaching for my silverware, but Keltie doesn’t seem to pick up the hint that she’s outstayed her welcome, leaning on the edge of the table and fixing Ryan with a grave look. “So are y’all in town for Shane’s funeral?”  
  
A flash of confusion skates across Ryan’s face, but he covers it quickly, setting his coffee down and nodding. “Yeah. Terrible, ain’t it? Uh... what exactly happened to him again?”  
  
“They’re sayin’ it’s some kinda animal,” Keltie says, her voice hushed as she takes up residence in the empty chair again. I decide that table manners can go fuck themselves and dig into my waffle, chewing through her explanation. “They found him in his living room with his throat torn wide open. Police said it looked like there’d been a struggle, but they couldn’t find any weapons or nothin’, said it looked like he’d been mauled. I’d like to think it’s simple as all that, but...”  
  
Ryan looks up at her, frowning around a spoonful of grits. “But what?”  
  
“Nothin’. I shouldn’t even bring it up, not here.” She goes to get up, toying with the hem of her apron.  
  
“Keltie.” In an instant, all of that easy amiability he’s had since we sat down evaporates, his hand settling on her shoulder and holding her down in the seat. “But what?”  
  
She shifts awkwardly in the chair, faltering under the weight of the look he’s giving her. “It’s just... his door was  _locked,_  Ryan. How could an animal’ve done that if his door was locked? And then you’ve got all those other missin’ people and... folks are startin’ to talk.”  
  
“How d’you mean?”  
  
“Oh, it’s not... it’s just fish stories. You know how the people around here are.” By this point Keltie’s looking extremely uncomfortable, wringing her hands in her lap. “Just some regulars that’ve been comin’ in with tall tales about weird stuff they seen on the highway, figures that disappear, lights on in barns that’ve been abandoned for years.”  
  
Ryan’s jaw tenses almost imperceptibly, but he finally takes his hand off her shoulder, opting instead to drum his fingers absently across the vinyl-covered tabletop. “And what do you think?”  
  
“I... I don’t know what I think. I  _wanna_  believe that Shane dyin’ and all those people disappearin’ don’t have a thing in common.”  
  
“You’re smarter than that, Kelts. Everyone in this town is smarter than that.”  
  
Keltie opens her mouth to respond but apparently thinks better of whatever it was she was going to say, clambering to her feet and wiping her palms on the wrinkled fabric of her apron. “I should get back to work. If y’all are stayin’ at your house, I could bring you some dinner after I get off?”  
  
“We’ll be fine. Hey, Keltie.” Ryan grabs her wrist before she can scamper off, his thumb pressing into the thin blue lattice of veins beneath her sun-kissed skin. “Just... don’t go anywhere alone for the next couple of days, all right? I don’t like the sound of any of this. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”  
  
“Yeah, okay,” she nods, trying for a smile, but even the creepy grin has diminished into nothing but a nervous quirk of her lips.  
  
I wait for Keltie to disappear behind the counter again before turning back to Ryan, raising an eyebrow. “All right, do you want to bring me up to speed with what the fuck’s going on here or do I have to muddle through it myself?”  
  
“Apparently on top of the missin’ people you found in your research, some guy Keltie and I went to school with wound up dead,” he says, pointing at the wall behind me. It’s full of framed pictures of what I assume are local high school football players. The one Ryan’s indicating is dated 2002. The guy kneeling in a standard school-photo pose within the frame looks like kind of a douche, an arrogance in his smile that rubs me the wrong way, but I guess I shouldn’t judge. “I mean, it’s no skin off my nose. Shane was an asshole.”  
  
“Ryan!”  
  
“What?” he shrugs, going back to his breakfast and rolling his eyes. “I’m just tellin’ the truth. Thought he was better than everyone just ‘cause he was the mayor’s kid. Got a football scholarship to the University of Alabama and his head swelled up to the size of the Hindenburg.”  
  
I frown at him, finishing the last dregs of my coffee and looking back at the boy in the picture. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s rude to speak ill of the dead?”  
  
“Why? He’s dead. Not like he cares.” There's nothing for me to say in response, because in a warped, morbid sort of way, Ryan has a point. And in that point is something so profoundly hollowing that a wave of emptiness hits me like a locomotive, stealing my breath and turning my stomach. He’s right. Dead people don’t care, because they’re dead. The smirking guy in the photograph doesn’t care about Ryan’s opinion of him, because he’s dead.  
  
My family doesn’t care that I’m still fighting, because they’re dead. So what am I still fighting for?  
  
I still don’t have an answer by the time Ryan finishes his food and slaps a fifty on the table, adjusting his jacket as he stands. He tells Keltie to keep the change as we’re walking out. She smiles at him. He winks. I have an inexplicable urge to take the apple pie she’s got in her hands, place it delicately upon the counter, and slam her face into it repeatedly. Scowling, I stalk across the parking lot and hover next to my side of the car, fingers drumming impatiently along the Mustang’s roof while Ryan unlocks his door. “Well, I think we can safely pinpoint our prime suspect. Did you see how nervous she looked?”  
  
Ryan has a good long laugh at that, which only serves to make me more irritated. Slowly, the smile dies on his face, replaced with a look of disbelief as the engine hums to life. “You’re serious?”  
  
“Of course I’m serious!” I snap, crossing my arms and glaring out the window. We pull back out onto the road, heading out of the more densely populated area of Summerdale, which is suburban at most, and into sprawling countryside. Minutes pass, and Ryan keeps giving me this amused, mocking look that makes me want to smack him. “What, do you really trust her enough to believe that she has nothing to do with it? She was jittery as hell back there!”  
  
“Yeah, I do trust her,” Ryan shrugs, driving with his knees long enough to light a cigarette and roll down his window before turning to me with a raised eyebrow. “And that  _really_  pisses you off, doesn't it? I’ve known Keltie since we were both in diapers, Bren. She’s harmless as a newborn lamb, all right? The girl cries when she sees roadkill and wouldn’t say ‘shit’ if she had a mouthful of it. She ain’t what we’re after. Did it ever occur to you that maybe she’s nervous because people we’ve known all our lives are droppin’ off the face of the Earth, and then to top it off, our local golden boy ends up torn to shreds in his own home? Hell, I’d be suspicious if she were  _calm._  The only reason Keltie’s skittish is because she knows what’s really goin’ on. I think everyone does.”  
  
I snort and start to wave off his (clearly biased) defense, but something odd about it strikes me. “Wait... Keltie knows that you’re a hunter?”  
  
“Every person in this town knows I’m a hunter,” he sighs, turning off the highway onto an honest-to-God dirt road that rumbles loudly under the tires as we roll along. “Summerdale is... different. It’s a long story, but six or seven really big huntin’ families’ve had roots here. Town this small, you can’t hide that sort of thing. You grow up in Summerdale, you grow up knowin’ what’s really out there, knowin’ that there are people who fight it. You know about it, but you don’t talk about it. Around here, the paranormal is kinda like the flamboyantly gay uncle that shows up with his ‘roommate’ to your family Christmas dinner every year. Everyone knows, but no one says anything.”  
  
Blinking out at the road, I slowly uncross my arms, not quite sure about all the holes in the plot that Ryan’s presenting to me. I’d buy Keltie the neighbor girl with an obvious penchant for stalking being in on the fact that the Ross’s were involved in some spooky shit, but a whole town? And then there’s the nature of the problem at hand. “But if you grew up in a town with a ton of hunters, why is this happening? Shouldn’t someone have taken care of it by now?”  
  
Ryan’s expression hardens for a moment, tension tugging at his jawline and hands tightening on the wheel. “There ain’t a ton of hunters. Not anymore, at least. Most of ‘em are dead. But you’re right, there’s someone who should've taken care of it. I aim to find out why he hasn’t.”  
  
Within another minute or so, we take a sharp left off the dirt road and onto a long gravel drive that leads up to a gorgeous old colonial-style farmhouse. It’s like something off a postcard, sitting there in the middle of an open field with sweet-smelling tall grass rustling in the faint breeze. Summerdale is nothing more than a blur off in the distance, and the only other buildings in sight are a large red barn around the back of the house, and another similar set-up about a mile or so down the road. The place is a little worn, I notice. The steps up to the wraparound porch creak even under Ryan’s inconsequential weight, and I can see the paint peeling off the red shutters and whitewashed siding all the way from the driveway. It’s a bit run-down, a bit neglected, but you can tell that someone cared about it once. There are pretty hanging baskets dangling between the columns holding up the porch roof, the petunias in them starting to wilt just a little, an old welcome mat laid out in front of the door. I’m about to ask where the hell we are, but I end up answering my own question, turning around enough to see the long-faded  _Ross_  etched into the mailbox at the corner where the driveway meets the road.  
  
Oh. Wait, what?  
  
Grumbling something under his breath about how someone’s a lazy bastard and needs to mow the goddamn lawn, Ryan peels back the welcome mat, prays up one of the floorboards from the porch beneath it, and stands back up with a tarnished key in hand. He’d said that his entire family was dead, but if that’s the case, who’s watering the plants? Who’s neglecting to mow the lawn or bring in the mail that’s sticking out of the front of the mailbox? Crazy Keltie? Ryan looks like he’s about a breath away from either being sick or punching someone as he jams the key in the doorknob and turns it, swinging the door inwards on creaky hinges and not seeming to care whether I follow him or not. He storms immediately down a quaintly decorated hallway, his lanky stride almost too much to keep up with as I jog after him, more confused than ever. “Hey, Spence, you wanna tell me why the hell you didn’t call me when people started disappearin’ all over the place?”  
  
Silence. Ryan frowns. “Spencer?”  
  
More silence. For the briefest moment, I swear that I see him look almost scared, his face paling in the light filtering in through the windows. Ryan turns on his heel and walks into an outdated but sort of ironically cute kitchen, roosters on the wallpaper and bright yellow appliances and a little plastic dog-door screwed into the back door. The place is clearly inhabited by a guy, dishes piled up in the sink and empty fast food bags littered all over the place. Or at least, was inhabited by a guy. There’s a half-eaten burger sitting on the formica tabletop that’s clearly been there for a while, and the silence in the house is starting to sink eerily into my bones. Something’s off here, and if my gut instinct weren’t enough to tell me so, the slow trepidation spreading across Ryan’s entire demeanor would be.  
  
A sharp clatter rattles suddenly from the corner and we both jump, Ryan’s hand dropping automatically to where I know his gun is tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket. But it turns out to be nothing of the spooky variety; just a very excited little Beagle that comes crashing through the dog-door and immediately begins attempting to climb Ryan’s leg. Smiling slightly, he drops to one knee and lets the dog flail into his arms, scratching behind its ears and looking around the kitchen. “Hey, Hobo! You miss me, sweet girl? Where’s Spence, huh?”  
  
“Who’s Spencer?” I ask, leaning down and letting Hobo sniff my hand. She licks my knuckles after a second and happily lets me pet her, obviously more friendly in spirit than her master has ever been. “You said all your family was-”  
  
“Dead, yeah, but Spencer ain’t a Ross, he’s a Smith. One of those other Summerdale huntin’ families I was tellin’ you about,” Ryan says absently, getting to his feet and walking a slow circle around the kitchen. “We were best friends growin’ up; our dads used to work cases together sometimes. When I... when I decided to not come back here a few years ago, he moved in, said he’d look after the place, take care of Hobo for me. All his folks were gone by then, anyway. He’ll call every once in a while, check up on me. But the real question is where is he now?”  
  
“Maybe he’s on a case?” I offer, even though I know it’s blind optimism. The half-eaten food on the table, the weird air of abandonment hovering around the place, Hobo running around loose... none of it seems like the actions of someone who’s left on a planned trip.  
  
Almost as if he’s read my thoughts, Ryan shakes his head, wandering out of the kitchen and further back the hallway. What might be a living room in anyone else’s home is different here, something akin to Pete and Patrick’s library, nestled into a room on the back corner of the first floor. There are shelves upon shelves of books, a large table covered in maps, a whole wall next to the bay window that’s been covered in cork and turned into a giant bulletin board. Sighing, he points to the papers tacked up there, pictures of the missing people that I’d found in the news reports, grisly crime scene photos of whatever the hell happened to Football Star Shane. “No way in hell Spencer would go outta town on a case when this shit’s happenin’ right at home. Something about all of this feels off. You gettin’ that vibe too?”  
  
I laugh nervously, making a pointed effort not to look at the crime scene photos any more than I have to. “That vibe that makes me feel caught between throwing up and running as far away as possible? Yeah, starting to feel it.”  
  
“Told you that you had the gut for this, kid.” Ryan’s fingers splay almost reverently across the collage of police reports and photos tacked to the wall, tracing along the lines of print and red lines connecting case to case. His lips move almost soundlessly, a whisper breathed out into the silence of the room that isn’t meant for me. “All this work done, and then just... gone. What  _happened_ to you, Spence?”  
  
“Do you think he went after whatever it was?” I ask, taking a step closer to the bulletin board and squinting at the paper forest of sticky notes and bad photocopies that cover it. On the whole, it’s far less organized than Patrick’s system, and even that’s chaotic at best. There are pieces of three or four cases scattered across the wall, jigsaw-pieces of horror stories come to life that I can’t put together. I know better than to think Ryan’s able to. Not because he’s stupid, not by a long shot. But with every passing second I can see the worry creeping in behind his eyes and settling across his bones. And when Ryan’s personally invested, he gets sloppy. It’s one of the facts about him that I’ve learned to work with.  
  
He shakes his head sharply, yanking one of the police reports off the wall and reading over it. “Nah. He would’ve called Keltie if he was goin’ on a case. It’s her job to get ahold of me if he’s gone for a week and doesn’t check in, and Hobo’s bowl still had food in it when we walked in the kitchen. Besides, everything around here’s just... freaky. It’s like he just vanished into thin air. Look, his truck’s still sittin’ in the barn.”  
  
I take a second to glance out the big bay window on the opposite wall, met with the sight of a bright blue ninety-something F-150 parked inside the open doors of the barn in the backyard. Ryan has a point. Everything here is starting to feel freaky, to the point where I nearly jump out of my skin when Hobo trots into the library and headbutts my leg, looking from me to Ryan questioningly. She’s one of those dogs you can just tell are smart, a certain intelligence in the tilt of her head.  _So you’re with him now? I can trust you? Okay, what’s going on?_  
  
“I wish I knew,” I whisper, kneeling down to scratch behind her ears while Ryan keeps reading over the police files and mumbling to himself. I almost miss the rumpled sheet of notebook paper, half-covered with the paraphernalia of other cases and clinging to the wall by only a thin strip of masking tape. It’s something that would be easy enough to look over, but something visceral in me sets up an alarm when I see it, urging me to take a closer look. Not for the first time, I begin to wonder if Ryan’s whole ‘you’ve got the gut for this’ spiel is more than just his own gruff brand of complement. I snatch the paper off the wall and read quickly over the messy handwriting scrawled with no regard for the little blue lines, my eyes widening with every word. “Ryan?”  
  
“Not now; I’m busy.”  
  
“No, seriously-”  
  
“I said  _not now-_ ”  
  
“Would you quit being such a grumpy pain in the ass and  _listen to me?!_ ” I snap, standing up and shoving the paper in his direction. “We don’t even need to put the pieces together, man. Spencer already had the case solved when he disappeared.”  
  
His interest apparently piqued, Ryan grabs the handwritten note and begins to mumble through its contents. “‘January third, update from S and D.’ is that the Winchesters or... goddammit, Spence, stop tryin’ to use shorthand. ‘Eve on the move, building army. Alphas instructed to convert as many as possible. Missing people from Summerdale most likely conversion victims, Shane’s death points to...’”  
  
Ryan stops reading, his face moon-pale and drawn into an expression of pure terror. The look on his face when he had a Wendigo snarling on top of him? Surprise and resigned acceptance. The look on his face when he watched me shoot a little Werewolf in a back alley? Sadness and weariness. Now? Now he’s nothing but unadulterated horror, the paper slipping from his hand as he staggers backwards and clutches the table for support. From the worn carpeting, that last unspoken word blares upwards, something that must mean far more to Ryan than it does to me.  
  
 _Vampires._  
  
It’s that moment in Pete and Patrick’s kitchen all over again, his walls crumbling for a second’s time followed by the visible process of him building them up again. Ryan manages to regain his steadiness on his feet, but even then he doesn’t quite get rid of the panic that sparks behind his eyes, belied by the eerie calm of his voice. “Get your stuff, Brendon, we’re leavin’.”  
  
Were it physically possible, I think my jaw would hit the floor. “What?”  
  
“Did I fuckin’ stutter?” he snarls, walls fully reconstructed. Barbed wire? No. There’s a goddamn force field at the top now. “Get to the car, we’re goin’ back to Chicago.”  
  
“The hell we are!” I counter, darting over to the doorway and blocking Ryan’s exit. “We  _know_  what we’re after now! There’s absolutely no reason for us to run away!”  
  
Ryan gives me a look that very clearly says if I don’t get out of his way, he won’t hesitate to hit me. I don’t move. Neither does he. Your poker face needs some work, Ross. He brings a hand up to rake through his hair, and I can see that it’s shaking visibly. We stare each other down for a few more seconds until Ryan finally caves, cursing under his breath and stalking back over to the bulletin board. “Yeah, and what we’re dealin’ with is about ten miles over our heads, kid.”  
  
“Why?” Shrugging, I walk over to where he’s staring at the case files again. “I think the Arachne incident proved that we know how to decapitate things. That’s how you get them, right? Cut off their heads?”  
  
Ryan sways on his feet, looking positively ill. “Bren...”  
  
“So what could the issue be with-”  
  
“That Arachne was  _alone,_  you putz!” he finally explodes, rounding on me with a glare that could drop a man at ten paces. “She was alone, she’d just snacked on six or seven people, and she wasn’t part of anything organized! We’re up against five hungry fledglings and at least one sire on this. Our  _best_  case scenario is six-on-two, Brendon, d’you  _really_  wanna play those odds?!”  
  
There’s a desperation in his voice that I can’t quite understand, something unspoken that utterly  _pleads_  with me to just drop it and go get in the car. I’ve never been good at letting things go. “So we just leave?”  
  
“We leave, and we call William and his team on it. This is what they do, clear out vamp nests. It’s their niche. They’re a damn sight more prepared for it than we are, with the added bonus that there’s four of ‘em, which evens the odds a bit.”  
  
“Last I heard of William’s crew, they were in upstate California,” I say, shaking my head. “Patrick taught me about Vampire nests, Ry, I’m not talking out of my ass here. If these things are recruiting, they’re going to turn the new ones, feed, and leave. And if Shane was the company picnic, they’re getting ready to move on. By the time William gets here, it’ll be too late.”  
  
“What d’you want me to do about it?” Ryan hisses, backing into the corner of the room like a wounded animal and looking around for an escape route. If he gets any more desperate, he might actually jump out the window. “You honestly expect me to run around playin’ the hero? Think again. People that do that have a way of endin’ up dead, and I ain’t quite ready for that yet.”  
  
“I  _expected_  you to care enough about the people here to do something other than running back to Chicago with your tail between your legs.” He flinches, and I know I’ve hit my mark. I adjust my sights and focus back in on the target, squeeze the trigger a little more pointedly. “All those people who talked to you in the diner this morning. The sweet little old lady who stopped you outside and told you how much everyone missed you.  _Keltie._  Any one of them could be the next dead body. Do you want to read about them in the papers and think back to how you did nothing?”  
  
He falters again, almost visibly shrinking, eyes fixed on his shoes. “Brendon, don’t.”  
  
Almost. Fix my stance, reload. Ready. Aim. Fire. “I’ve always thought you were a dick, Ryan, but I didn’t think you were the kind of person to stand by and watch the people who love you die.”  
  
Boom. Headshot.  
  
For the briefest second after he looks up at me, Ryan’s eyes seem too-bright and oddly reflective, a weird sheen across them that disappears after he blinks hastily. I tell myself that it was just a trick of the light so I don’t immediately feel like kicking myself in the face. He still seems so terribly small, huddled there in the corner with his quaking hands and the fear still sitting palpably under his skin. But his voice is the same as ever when he speaks, the rough baritone drawl miles out of place in a body that now seems far too fragile to produce it. “We’ll look into it. Fact findin’ mission only. We’ll see what we can see, look at the situation, and call William. That’s it.”  
  
I sigh around a smile, leaning against the door frame. “That’s better than running away.”  
  
“Why does everything I do always translate to runnin’ away to you?” Ryan replies defensively.  
  
“Because by your own confession, you’ve spent the majority of your life running,” I say, rolling my eyes. “And because you’re hands-down the most evasive person I’ve ever met.”  
  
“Touche.” He almost smiles, but it’s lost under that horribly scared look again, something distant in his expression that says he’s looking in my direction but not quite looking at me. “I don’t wanna do this, Bren.”  
  
“We’ve both had a hell of a night. Day? Night. Either way, I’m sure if you just get some sleep, we can go out later and-”  
  
“No.” Shaking his head, Ryan finally manages to make it out of his corner, digging his car keys out of his pocket. “They’re less active in the daylight. Now’s the time to check things out. Besides, if we don’t leave now I’ll only end up losin’ my nerve.”  
  
He goes to shove past me, but before I can even process the action, my hand wraps around his wrist, stalling him. I half expect him to yank his arm away and storm off because it’s Ryan, but his only reaction is to pause in the doorway, looking at me with those world-weary eyes, a fleeting rabbit-hearted drumbeat thrumming through his veins against the pad of my thumb. And it finally clicks. The reason my gut told me that something felt off, the reason I felt so uneasy. It wasn’t because of Spencer being missing or the house being abandoned.  
  
It’s because this is the first time in my life I’ve ever seen Ryan Ross truly frightened.  
  
“Hey,” I murmur, feeling the bird-boned structure of his wrist shifting beneath my palm, all corded tendons and sharp edges. “I don’t know what’s got you so freaked out, but breathe, okay? Nothing bad is going to happen. I promise, you'll be okay.”  
  
“Okay.” There’s something soft and not-so-guarded in Ryan’s voice, a raw sort of vulnerability that strikes me off guard. “All right. I believe you. I trust you.”  
  
He doesn’t say anything else between the house and the car, but as the Mustang rattles down the old dirt road, I can’t help but feel like I’ve just been given a very precious gift.

 

* * *

 

Two empty barns, an outdated gas station, and an abandoned church later, I’m starting to think that Spencer Smith has led us on a wild goose chase. Ryan and I have cleared pretty much every dark, creepy space in the general area of Summerdale with absolutely nothing to show for it but lost hours when we could have been sleeping and a growing sense of apprehension that I can practically taste. A summery pop-punk band I’d never heard of was playing on the stereo in attempts to brighten the mood, but after the third empty building, Ryan jabbed angrily at his iPod until the entirety of his country genre started playing, cranking up the volume. Over the past hour, I’ve heard at least five different songs about beer, two or three about girls in cutoffs dancing on tractors or something.  
  
By the time we roll up to the imposing figure of a rusted-out building towering over the empty countryside, ‘Southern Comfort Zone’ is playing loudly enough to rattle the Mustang’s windows and probably wake up anything that might be sleeping inside. Pursing my lips, I jab at the pause button and cut Brad Paisley off mid-chorus, looking at Ryan speculatively. “You know, we probably should have wrapped our arms like what we did with the Arachne. Hindsight.”  
  
“No point in it,” he says bluntly, swinging his door open and climbing out into the afternoon sunlight, walking around to pop the trunk. “The bite ain’t what gets you. Vampirism’s a blood-borne condition. Blood-to-mouth or wound-to-wound, even a drop, and you’re done. The most important rule of fightin’ vamps is don’t let ‘em cut you. Not because of the risk of you bleedin’ to death, but the risk of some of its blood gettin’ in the wound when you cut its head off. You want the katana or the machete?”  
  
“I’ll try my hand with the machete,” I shrug, the chrome of the back bumper sun-warmed against my legs as I lean against it and watch Ryan poke around in the arsenal. “Not like it’s likely for us to actually be swinging at anything anyways. I’m betting they skipped town after they got done snacking on that Shane guy.”  
  
“I’m bettin’ you’re right. This place is an old cotton processin’ plant, last possible place they could be for about seventy miles.” Ryan takes a few steps closer to the building, looking up at the darkened windows. “Even so, be careful. Fledglings ain’t fun to deal with.”  
  
Frowning, I walk over to stand beside him. “Why are they any different than regular Vampires?”  
  
Ryan sighs shakily, his grip on the hilt of the katana tightening. He reminds me of one of those soldiers you see on documentary specials that have flashbacks after they get home from the war. One wrong word, one familiar sound, and they’re right back on the battlefield, trapped in a nightmare they can’t escape. The idea of Ryan’s war stories used to fascinate me. Now I’m starting to think I don’t want to hear them at all, watching the way his weight shifts uncomfortably back and forth between his feet. “You’ve probably never really been starvin’, kid, but try to imagine it for a second. Think of the hungriest you’ve ever been. Think of walkin’ around like that every single day. Now think of every single person you pass holdin’ bags and bags of delicious food. They walk by and you can smell that food, and you get even hungrier. What would you do to those people if you were starvin’?”  
  
“I’d probably just sucker-punch someone take their food,” I say, not quite getting it.  
  
Ryan nods as if I’ve come to the conclusion for him. “And that’s why fledglings are nasty. Starvation turns ‘em into animals. They smell blood, they go nuts.”  
  
I gulp, adjusting my jacket and silently praying that I don’t have any papercuts that I haven’t noticed. Ryan looks wary, but not as much as he did at the first few places we checked. I think he’s given up on the nameless fear that comes with us finding anything, only determined now to tie up loose ends for the sake of the case. The doors don’t even have padlocks, a big sliding one on the side of a building giving way to his efforts with a rusty creak, opening to the darkness beyond. I see a colony of dust bunnies and some creepy-looking old machinery, but there’s nothing flying out to suck my blood. I guess we really were too late.  
  
“Well, this place is a scary movie waiting to happen,” I mumble as we duck across the threshold, my voice bouncing back down from the rafters in a resonant echo.  
  
“Looks empty. Go poke around and holler if you find anything. I’ll clear the main workspace and meet up with you back in the offices in ten,” Ryan waves we off with his flashlight, already starting to check under machines and behind tables for things that have clearly never been there. I decide to leave him to himself if that’s what he wants, all of his anger about us getting separated during the Arachne incident apparently forgotten.  
  
The office spaces are cramped and dilapidated, old managers’ names peeling off the frosted glass in their doors and file cabinets rusting away to fragile skeletons stuffed with yellowed papers. It’s all creepy, but not in an obvious Vampires-have-been-living-here way. No bloodstains on the walls, no dead bodies stashed in the closets, no nothing. Sighing, I swing open the last door in the little hallway off the main room, sweeping my flashlight around. It catches on something and I frown, a hand drifting down to the machete shoved through my belt as I step over the threshold. I angle the light more carefully, casting it down on what I can now identify as a cheap, store-bought air mattress. Another to the left. Two more. And oh, there in the corner,  _there_  are the bloodstains.  
  
Shit.  
  
I turn on my heel, ready to sprint for my life back out into the main area. “Hey, I found-”  
  
 _WHAM._  
  
Something hits me in the back hard enough to expel the air from my lungs in an almighty whoosh, the impact sending me sprawling forward. It’s a miracle I don’t land on my blade, flailing my arm off to the side just in time to keep Ryan’s machete and my intestines from having an unfortunate encounter. For a moment I completely forget everything Pete taught me about close-quarters fighting, laying facedown on the concrete and trying to remember what oxygen feels like. I can feel a presence looming behind me and I wait for one second, two, three before I whip around and swing the machete for all I’m worth, hoping to hit flesh. A hand grabs my arm mid-swing, an absurdly powerful grip that nearly crushes my bones. I can feel fingernails digging into my skin, Ryan’s ultimatum of  _don’t let ‘em cut you_  playing a distorted loop in my head. In the skittering, uncertain strobe of my long-lost flashlight, I can see pretty, delicate hands, perfectly-shaped nails tipped in something shiny and metallic. Silver? The metal feels real as it presses into my flesh, cold, sharp, deadly. The grip on my arm shifts suddenly, and before I know it the machete has been twisted out of my hand, the traitorous blade settled against my Adam’s apple.  
  
“Go ahead. Scream.” The voice is a raspy alto that sounds like cigarettes and one too many angry shouts, quietly mocking as a body’s weight holds me down to the ground and lips brush the shell of my ear. “It’ll feel really nice when I rip out that pretty little throat. I’ve been craving some AB positive anyway.”  
  
“I heard that shit adds weight to your thighs like you wouldn’t  _believe,_ ” Ryan’s voice drawls out of the darkness. The sound of impact, two muffled voices cursing, and the weight is lifted.  
  
I scramble to my feet and dive after my flashlight, running over to where it rolled off into a corner during the fray. The shadowed figure of the Vampire and the more familiar, skinny silhouette of Ryan are trading blows in the dark, a series of punches and dodges that might be a dance if I didn’t know better. This is what two people who have been trained to fight look like up against each other, the spaces between their breaths almost intimate in the murderous intent they hold. The Vampire lands a solid hit on Ryan’s solar plexus and he doubles over, groaning, but still manages to grab her hand and twist her arm up over her head, pinning her against a wall while grabbing blindly for his katana. All of this happens in the space of time it takes for me to flick my flashlight back on.  
  
The sounds of struggling cease in an instant, a silence settling over the abandoned office that feels like Death itself. The Vampire draws in a shaky breath, her face still hidden in shadow. “Ryan?”  
  
“Wh-what?” I stutter, miles beyond confused. I take a step closer to them, raising my flashlight until both their faces come into focus. I immediately drop it again, the yellow circle of illumination rolling away across the floor, plunging the impossible scene back into blackness.  
  
Pinned up against the dirty wall in the old cotton processing plant in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama is a girl with short-cropped blonde hair, wide brown eyes, and an elfish face, disbelief parting her cupid-bow lips. The pretty girl from the picture in Ryan’s wallet. The one who’s been dead for four years.  
  
“Z,” he whispers.  
  
I’ve never heard one letter sound so much like a prayer.  
  
There’s no possible way for me to process this, and I can’t even begin to think what must be going on in Ryan’s head right now. How do you cope with someone coming back from the dead? For all the talk about losing everything he loved and all the  _I lost her_ ’s, she’s incredibly tangible now, breath hitching in her lungs and getting caught in the musty air. Not a corpse by a long shot. Only a monster. “Wait, but you’re supposed to be-”  
  
“Brendon, get out.”  
  
“Are you high?! I’m not leaving you in here alone with a-”  
  
 _“Get. Out.”_  He doesn’t have to say it a third time. I’ve heard irritation and warning in Ryan’s voice before, but I hear  _murder_  in it now. Stammering something about yelling if he needs me, I back slowly out of the room and pull the door shut behind me. The knob is a rusted old-fashioned one with a wide keyhole, and I can’t even bring myself to be ashamed for dropping to my knees and peering through it the second the latch clicks behind me, the shadows beyond swimming to life as Ryan pulls a flashlight out of his belt and flicks it on, setting it on the desk a few feet away. The hand that had the Vampire’s - Z’s - wrist pinned to the wall looses its grip, coming down to press against her cheek. A simple gesture, but what strikes me is the intimacy in it, the fact that Ryan’s even  _capable_  of intimacy.  
  
“You look older,” she says quietly, her hand rising to rest over his.  
  
Ryan breathes out shakily. “You don’t.”  
  
“Immortality will do that to you, I guess.”  
  
“What the hell are you doin’ here, Z?” And that’s what I don’t get. Ryan acts like he’s surprised to see her, sure, but not at all like he’s surprised to see her  _alive._  Patrick had seemed pretty certain when he told me that Ryan’s girlfriend had been dead for four years, but I’m left with the persistent feeling that I’ve been kept out of the loop again, watching the way he looks at her. Not as a ghost, but as something lost and found again.  
  
Z frowns slightly, pushing stray curls of hair back from Ryan’s face and moving a step closer to him. “I tried to steer them somewhere else, but Jack wasn’t hearing any of it. Said he wanted to wipe the Summerdale hunters off the map after what you and Spencer did back in Mobile. He was furious when we rolled into town and neither of you were here. They’ve already moved on, left me behind to clean up the place.”  
  
“Jack got his collateral in Mobile,” Ryan says, something so tight and broken in his voice that a sudden ache blooms in my chest. He cradles her face in his hands with a gentleness that I’ve only ever seen once before, in a dark, bloodstained alley with  _Bren. Come back to me._  reverberating against the inside of my skull. His back is to me and I can’t really see his face, but I can hear the sharp catch in his breath as he brushes his thumb across her cheekbone. “He got you.”  
  
“And you’re still blaming yourself for something that wasn’t your fault four years after the fact,” Z whispers.  
  
“But it _was_ my fault. I saw him comin’, if I’d been faster, if I’d moved first...” Ryan trails off, a whole universe of could-have-beens lingering in his unfinished sentence. “I could’ve saved you.”  
  
“You can’t save everyone, Ryan.”  
  
He laughs bitterly. “Couldn’t save Mom. Couldn’t save Dad. Couldn’t save you. What the  _fuck_  am I good for?”  
  
 _“Stop it.”_  When Z speaks up, there’s a touch of something in her voice that sounds so eerily familiar that it knocks me even further off balance. It takes me a second to place, that strength, but something in me breaks a little once I do. It’s the same strength, the same stalwart conviction that Ryan had when he told me the hard truths of life as a hunter. Now I know where he got it. In the shadowed relief of the flashlight, the sadness etched into her face is staggering, one of her hands pressed to his chest as if she’s seeking out a heartbeat there. “You are not your mistakes. You are not your accidents. You’re a good man and a great hunter, and losing yourself for the sake of drowning in one shortcoming is a  _damn_  stupid thing to do. There are too many good parts of you for that.”  
  
Ryan shakes his head, the hand pressed to her cheek moving to tilt her chin upwards. “The best part of me was you. There ain’t much else left.”  
  
“I never did get what you saw in me.”  
  
“I saw forever.”  
  
“Guess you should have looked a little harder,” Z says, trying to laugh, but it comes out as a sob, and in the small window of vision the keyhole offers me I can see the flashlight catching tears on her cheeks. “I don’t blame you for running away. It was a horrible thing to ask, but...”  
  
“But I was a goddamn coward, Z, go ahead and say it,” Ryan hisses, finally turning away from her and stalking a few steps closer to the door. For the first time since he kicked me out of the room, I can see his face. He’s aged decades in the span of minutes, raking a hand through his hair before turning back around to look at her. “I just... I saw you layin’ there and I  _knew_  what you wanted and I... I couldn’t do it.”  
  
“I hate living like this, Ry.” It’s the first time her voice sounds fragile, a faltering admission as she looks down at her own hands. I don’t know what she sees there, but I’m sure the invisible bloodstains run deep. “I was going to try to run off, live on animal blood until someone else found me, but Jack dosed me up with human blood before I got the chance, got me hooked. I don’t want to hurt people. I don’t, but then I just get so  _hungry_  and the next thing I know I’m looking at a body and...”  
  
Something in her seems to break, her will to stand upright crumbling as her knees buckle. Ryan moves like she’s an extension of himself, stopping her from hitting the ground effortlessly and holding her while she sobs out a mantra of disjointed, broken things into his shirt. He whispers something into her hair, but I don’t catch it, the door muffling too much of the sound. Z looks up at him through tear-swollen eyes, blinking slowly. “Are you sure?”  
  
“I’m sure,” Ryan nods mechanically, sounding absolutely dead inside. “It’s nothin’ more than what I should’ve done four years ago.”  
  
It’s an almost desperate motion, the way she pulls his lips down to hers and he crushes her against him in turn, spindly fingers balling up in the fabric of her shirt. No one’s ever kissed me like that, I realize, like the last of all the air in the world was trapped behind my lips and all they needed was to breathe me. No one’s ever kissed me like that, and if the short lifespan of hunters applies to me, no one ever will. I feel like I’m intruding on something so, so private, but I still can’t make myself look away, fascinated with the way Ryan holds her exactly like he holds his secrets, tightly and close to his heart. They seem like their own entity, and I read something about elephants once, about how when their mate dies, the other will just lie beside them and wait for the end as well, lost and directionless.  
  
Ryan’s been waiting for the end for the past four years.  
  
They part like it causes them physical pain, both shaking as Z kneels on the cold concrete and Ryan brushes his fingers over the hilt of the katana, cursing under his breath and trying to make himself look at her. “It wasn’t supposed to end this way. We were supposed to have a life, you and me. A picket fence and boring day jobs and a couple kids. We were supposed to be happy.”  
  
“After four years of hell, I don’t think I even remember what that word means anymore,” Z murmurs thoughtfully, her eyes rising to meet his. “You’re having second thoughts.”  
  
“Of course I’m havin’ second thoughts, I-”  
  
“Ryan, please.”  
  
Whatever those two words mean, it’s enough. Sucking in a breath that sounds more like a death-rattle, he carefully unsheathes the sword from the scabbard shoved through his belt, reaching down in her direction with his free hand. Z grabs it with a grateful nod, twining their fingers together and watching him, just watching him, like she’s hell-bent on searing every last part of him into her mind. Even though I can’t see his face, it’s easy enough to tell that Ryan’s doing the same. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”  
  
Z’s grip on his hand is white-knuckled, the flashlight catching fresh tears brimming in her eyes. “Do you still love me?”  
  
“I never stopped.” The blade swings in a flash of silver, and I close my eyes so I don’t have to watch Ryan take the last part of himself left intact and tear it apart.  
  
But it’s not enough to stop the sounds - a wet impact, a snap, the dull thud of something heavy hitting the floor. I reel back from the door with my stomach churning violently, stumbling back towards the main room and trying to think of anything, anything besides what Ryan’s face must look like right now. It was one thing for me to point a gun at my mother’s body and pull the trigger while some evil thing was using her to rip my family apart. This is quite another. But it’s close enough that I remember how it feels, that sudden, hopeless hollowness as you’re looking down at the body of someone you love, and the memory of it nearly undoes me. I hold onto a dusty old machine near the wall to hold myself upright, trying to remember how to breathe.  
  
Ryan walks past me like I don’t exist.  
  
To him, I don’t think the rest of the world exists anymore. Every movement is robotic, like he’s on autopilot, shuffling across the floor. Bloodstained shirt, vacant eyes, one step at a time. He’s not crying, not curling up in a ball on the floor, not screaming at the unfairness of it all. The best part of him is a cooling body in a musty office a few yards away, and he is still standing.  
  
That’s when I realize that Ryan is made of steel. Made. Of. Steel.  
  
He doesn’t speak to me all the way to the car. The drive back to his house passes in oppressive silence. We’re sitting in his driveway when he finally decides to break it, looking over at me slowly. His voice is so empty that he doesn’t even sound like himself. “You promised me that nothin’ bad would happen. I told you I didn’t wanna do the case, I told you I wanted to leave. You promised me that nothin’ bad would happen, and I trusted you.”  
  
I want to crawl into a hole and never re-emerge. Being pushy has always been one of my faults, but up until now it’s never really  _hurt_  anyone. I think back to the small handful of promises that Ryan’s made me. He’s kept every one of them. I can’t even keep one.  
  
He walks back inside with that same mechanical stride, looking so painfully lost even in the midst of his own home. He either doesn’t notice Hobo trotting over to sniff at his leg or doesn’t have the strength to acknowledge her, shuffling into the kitchen and throwing his duffel bag down on the table. Outside, the sun is beginning to set. Ryan digs around in the bag until he comes up with that telltale little orange bottle, half-full and rattling dangerously.  
  
I think back to that thing I read about elephants. Ryan’s been waiting for the end for four years. No doubt he’s tired of it by now.  
  
“Here,” I mumble, prying the bottle from his surprisingly pliant fingers and twisting it open. I shake two tablets onto my palm and hand them to him, screwing the bottle shut and jamming it securely in my pocket. Irrational jealousy over a waitress this morning, suicide watch tonight. This is what my life has come to.  
  
He knocks back the Ambien and climbs the stairs without a word, disappearing into one of the rooms at the top with a faint click of the door. Still in shock, I dig around in my own bag until I come up with a ratty old t-shirt and some sweatpants to wear as pajamas. I leave my dirty clothes in the kitchen and climb the stairs with Hobo on my heels, stepping softly past what I can only assume is Ryan’s room in search of somewhere to sleep. There’s a guest room next door to Ryan’s that’s done up in pretty shades of green with a handmade quilt on the bed, a little dust on the dresser and nightstands, but suitable enough. Sighing heavily, I peel the covers back and burrow under them, staring at the ceiling in a futile waiting game for sleep. I can hear Hobo scratching at Ryan’s door for a minute or so, but after that she comes running back into my room, hopping up on the bed and curling up beside me. She rests her furry little head on my chest and I scratch behind her ears, both of us trapped in sleeplessness for minutes that stretch into hours.  
  
Hobo falls asleep long before I do, snoring through the darkness with her paws twitching through little puppy dreams. But she jerks awake sometime after midnight, brought instantly back to consciousness by the same sound that makes a leaden weight settle in my stomach.  
  
The walls in this house are thin. From the other side of my room, it’s not hard to make out the muffled sobs, visceral and heart-wrenching, held in until he thought everyone else in the house was asleep.  
  
That’s when I realize that Ryan is not made of steel. He is made of other, softer things. Maybe he was steel when I met him, but the quiet admission of  _I never stopped_  has turned him into something else, something beautifully tragic and quietly fragile.  
  
Glass. Ryan is made of glass. And behind his walls is nothing but a pile of broken shards.


	8. Chapter 7 - Ryan

 

 

 

 

For someone who’s spent a lifetime hunting them, I’ve never really given much thought as to what it’s like to be a ghost.  
  
This must be something close to it though, moving through the hours like an echo and wondering where my sense of purpose (not that I ever had much of one to begin with) has gone. I didn’t sleep at all last night. The Ambien tugged insistently at my consciousness, but the one time I was stupid enough to close my eyes, all I could see was the horrifying mess back in that abandoned office, blackish blood and the blankness in Z’s eyes after it was all over. It only took one flash of memory to make me determined to never sleep again. I waited until an hour of silence from Brendon’s room next door passed before I let myself cry, huddled under the covers in a room decorated with the mockery of my childhood, heavy-handed crayon drawings and a collection of action figures looking down at the wreckage of the little boy that used to sleep here. The sensation of crying itself is rare and unfamiliar, anyway. The last time I cried was four years ago when I lost Z for the first time, and the time before that was at my mother’s funeral when I was ten. I never shed a tear for Dad. Some part of me was afraid he’d rise out of his grave and tell me to man the fuck up. I’m not used to something prickly and unpleasant clawing at the lining of my throat, not used to my eyes burning or my breath hitching whenever I try to inhale.  
  
I don’t really remember how long I let it go on, that moment of weakness where I finally let myself hurt because of the small consolation that there was no one around to see it. All I know is that it eventually left me spent and shaking, curled in on myself in a vain effort to stop the blooming ache in the center of my chest, like something had dug its claws around my sternum and was trying to tear my ribcage wide open. Not that it’d find anything there. Some smoke-damaged lungs and a shriveled, blackened, useless thing that might have been a heart once. The hours passed with nothing to mark them but the growing sensation of a fire beneath my skin, razing my fragile remnants to the ground.  
  
By the time the sun rises, I’m a burnt-out husk.  
  
Brendon stirs in the next room, banging about with all his usual lack of grace, and I come to the harrowing realization that the tiny luxury of my solitude is over. It’s time to soldier up again, time to move on, time to pretend I’m not bothered by the fact that I’ve still got her blood caked under my fingernails and the taste of her on my lips. The prospect of getting up and facing that world is like tackling Everest with nothing but a walking stick and prayers. Not impossible, but so painfully difficult that I don’t want to think about it. But the whole point of my life seems to be doing things I don’t want to do, and Brendon will get curious enough to come check on me eventually. I can’t let him see me like this, a tearstained wreck with no direction and nothing to hold me upright anymore. It’s got an odd sort of comfort to it, this loss of connection, something cathartic in my grief that I don’t want to leave behind.  
  
Five seconds, Ryan. You get five more seconds of weakness. Four. Three. Two. One.  
  
Getting to my feet is running a marathon. Taking one step is an Olympic sprint.  
  
I’m exhausted by the time I make it to the door. The effort of being present in the situation is too much, too much to handle when I’m trapped on an endless loop of my worst nightmare playing over and over again in my mind. I can’t deal with it, so I shut down. Sure, it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism, the numbness settling over my bones like a psychological security blanket, but it allows me to function without the constant sensation of every cell in my body being made of lead. When I open the door, Brendon is standing out in the hallway staring at me, a concerned look on his face.  
  
“Are you-” he starts.  
  
“Don’t,” I cut him off, shaking my head. Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, and for the love of God, don’t ask if I’m okay. I no longer have the strength to lie.  
  
Time takes on an odd quality, a skittering jump in my perception that I can’t really process. Somehow I’ve gone from that short exchange in the hall to staring blankly at the tiles of the shower wall while the water running down my back is slowly losing its heat. I feel like a puppet with cut strings, all lifeless limbs and the ruination of someone’s good intentions. It’s all well and good when you’re too disconnected to realize it, but the closer I get to lucidity the more it sinks down to the core of me, that awful, powerless feeling.  
  
Go. Move. Do something. The world isn’t going to stop for you. The longer you lay facedown in the middle of life’s highway, the more likely it is that something’s going to run you over.  
  
With shaking hands and a sick feeling in my stomach, I try to scrub Z off of me, again and again until my skin is reddened and raw. I try to pick her out from under my nails until my fingertips are ragged and bleeding, try to wash her out of my hair until my scalp aches. It doesn’t work. She still clings to me like the stubborn ghost I’ve always known she would be, hovering just outside my vision, dancing around the shadowed corners of my mind. She made a promise once in the darkest part of the night that she’d never leave me, and at the time, it had felt like the only comfort I had in the world. Now it feels like a curse. She will never leave me. There will never be another moment that passes where I don’t have to constantly relive what it felt like to watch her lifeless body slump to the ground, a corpse because I  _made_  her into one, dead because of the swing of my arm and the edge of my blade. She will never leave me.  
  
I wonder how long it will be before I go completely crazy. It’s not a short drive. Just the distance between a quiet bedroom on a lazy Sunday morning and an unmarked grave, the distance between  _I love you_  and  _Goodbye._  
  
Spencer’s razor and shaving cream are sitting on a little nook in the corner of the shower, and yeah, there’s just another name to add to the list of people I’ve lost. There had been some small comfort in Z mentioning that the vampires hadn’t found him, but if he’s been gone for this long without a trace, I know better than to allow myself any optimism. He’s dead in a ditch somewhere. Either that, or he’s in a whole world of shit that I couldn’t hope to get him out of on my best day, not to mention now, when I’m the textbook definition broken. I’d gotten drunk enough one night years ago to tell him my impression myself and my poison touch, how everyone I make the mistake of caring about is doomed from the start. He just smiled and shook his head, heels kicked up on the coffee table as some late-night talk show muttered on in the background.  _“Your theory’s got a fault, Ryan. I’m still here.”_  
  
Yeah. How’s that theory looking now, Spence?  
  
Another jump in time, and somewhere in the blankness of my autopilot-mind I’ve gotten dressed and packed my things, standing in the kitchen with a recycled plastic bag from Piggly Wiggly in hand. Inside is a small collective of supplies - dog bowl, extra collar, extra leash, a half-empty box of Milkbones, an old teddy bear that’s been gnawed and loved practically to pieces. Again, Brendon’s in the room, but he’s quiet, watching me with a guarded sort of expression. Like he knows that nothing about me is even close to all right any more, and that this is just the icing on the cake.  
  
“Hobo. Wanna go for a car ride?” I call out into the house, and it takes approximately half a second for her to come sprinting down the hallway, hopping eagerly in front of the front door. She looks back at me and barks excitedly, and I swear my stomach drops into my shoes.  
  
One more blip in the continuum. Some part of me knows that Hobo spent the whole trip to Keltie’s house curled up on my lap, but now we’re standing on her porch while Brendon watches from the car, my finger pressed insistently into the doorbell.  
  
“Ryan, I was worried sick about you! Did you go lookin’ for whatever it -” Keltie starts yammering the second she opens the door, taking a few seconds to notice what I’m sure is an utterly blank look on my face, slowly trailing off into a horror-struck silence. “What happened?”  
  
“Spencer’s gone,” I tell the half-truth because inventing a complete lie would be too much effort, unable to feel the slightest spark of empathy when Keltie claps a hand over her mouth and tears start swimming in her eyes. The three of us have known eachother since we were toddlers. She’s lost a friend every bit as much as I have. I can’t bring myself to care. “Not dead. Well, maybe not. But when Brendon and I got to the house everything was a mess and he’d been gone for at least a few days. There was stuff from cases thrown everywhere, Hobo was runnin’ around loose, his truck was still parked outside. Whatever happened, he’s officially MIA. Brendon and I wrapped up the case here last night, so you won’t be dealin’ with any more bodies, but...”  
  
“But you’re skippin’ town. Again.” Keltie doesn’t even look surprised, and that hurts a little more than it should. “Are you gonna go look for him?”  
  
I have no idea what’s happened to Spencer. No idea what he was into that could have led to him going missing, no leads to where he could possibly be, and a whole world of possibilities. There’s nothing to narrow it down at all. The odds of me finding him are less than getting struck by lightning, less than winning the lottery, less than Z coming back to life.  
  
“Yeah,” I lie, even though it takes everything I have in me to do it. Keltie deserves some of the comfort that I’m incapable of giving myself. “But I need you to watch Hobo for me. I can’t take her on the road. You and her are the only things I got left in this town, Kelts. I’d feel better if I knew you two were lookin’ out for eachother.”  
  
“Of course,” Kelite nods, taking the end of Hobo’s leash from one hand and the plastic bag of her supplies from the other. “Just... take care, Ryan.”  
  
“I’ll try.” More lies. It’s hard to have a sense of self-preservation when nothing means anything anymore. Walking back to the car feels like a death march. I turn the ignition, pull out onto the road, leave the last pieces of home I have left behind in a cloud of dust.  
  
I don’t look back.

 

* * *

 

The ambient sounds of the drive are the closest thing to peace I’ll probably ever get again. It’s familiar enough to be calming, the hum of rubber on the road, the solid clunk of gears shifting, my iPod left untouched on shuffle as we work our way up I-65. I don’t leave any room for conversation because I don’t want it, searching out contentment somewhere between thirty-five over the speed limit and the last cigarette in the pack. The sun rises high overhead and begins to sink back to the horizon, and there’s something odd in it that I’ve never been able to grasp, how everyone else’s world keeps turning long after mine has fallen apart.  
  
Brendon doesn’t say a word until a long while after we’ve crossed the border into Tennessee. “Are you hungry?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Do you want to stop and stretch your legs for a bit?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Do we need gas?”  
  
“No, Brendon,” I seethe, reaching forward and turning the volume up on the stereo in an effort to indicate that the conversation is over. But he’s right on every instance. My stomach is growling audibly, fatigue is making my grip loosen on the steering wheel, and the needle on the gas gauge is hovering ever closer to empty. Sighing resignedly, I take the first exit I see for Nashville. I won’t make it to Chicago without turning us both into smears on the pavement. Not that I really care about it in regards to myself, but my car deserves a better end than that.  
  
He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, looking like he’s working up the courage to say something before turning towards me. “I’m really-”  
  
“If you apologize to me, I will pull over, yank you outta this car, beat you to a bloody pulp, and leave you on the side of the road to hitchhike back to Chicago.”  
  
That shuts him up.  
  
The nightlife of downtown Nashville is just beginning to wake up as I navigate aimlessly through the streets, looking for a motel that's seedy enough to fit a hunter's criteria. I've never worked a case in Nashville before, I realize vaguely, never even stayed here for a pit stop. But I eventually manage to find a place just outside the busier part of town, neon lights flickering ominously on the sign and a gloomy air that matches me perfectly. Brendon's still quiet, silently observant through the whole check-in process and cautious almost to the point of meekness as he follows me to the room. Standard fare, really - worn carpet, outdated TV, horribly patterned comforters covered in mysterious stains. Just as well. I don't plan to be seeing too much of it.  
  
Brendon raises an eyebrow as I throw my duffel bag on the bed and pull out a fresh pack of cigarettes and my wallet. “Where are you going?”  
  
"Out." Like it's any of his goddamn business. I'm not going to expand the answer, tell him how I can't be in here long enough to risk going to sleep and drowning in the nightmares waiting just beyond consciousness, can't stay in one place lest my ghosts catch up with me for the millionth time and render me useless again.  
  
"Don't be stupid." His bag hits the other bed with a muffled thump, followed by him crossing his arms and shaking his head like I’m some sort of toddler he needs to scold. “You’re dead on your feet. You haven’t slept in probably forty-eight hours; you look like you’re about to pass out. The last thing you need right now is to go bar-hopping.”  
  
“Too bad it ain’t your job to tell me what I need,” I growl, trying to shove past him.  
  
“You don’t have to act like you’re okay! Who are you trying to fool? Me? It’s not working!” Brendon counters, but all I hear whenever his lips move is just  _pushy, pushy, pushy,_  always pushing, always trying to put me in places I don’t want to go, trying to make me discuss things that are better off buried so far down that no one can touch them. A muscle jumps in my jaw and I try to get around him again, but he just sidesteps and plants a hand on my shoulder, eyes dark and worried. I swear, the kid’s aged five years since I met him. If psychological scar tissue and age are parts of a direct proportion, I must be well over a century old by now. Some fucked-up loophole in the laws of physics makes me able to practically feel his skin even through my shirt and the contact _burns,_  feels like he’s setting my veins ablaze. I simultaneously love and hate that small break from my numbness, the comfort of knowing that I can still feel something mixing with the horror that it’s coming from  _him._  Brendon stares up at me, mouth moving soundlessly around some phrasing he can’t figure out as words bloom haltingly past his lips. “I... You’re not the only one who’s lost someone. I get what that’s like, how horrible it is, and for all of that common ground I’m still just standing here with you shutting me out over and over and over again. I feel like I’m throwing myself against a brick wall, Ryan, and all I’m trying to do is tell you that I’m sorry.”  
  
A deathly quiet descends, a long stretch of nothing followed by my contemplative whisper. “I told you what would happen if you apologized to me.”  
  
“What?” Brendon says confusedly.  
  
And then my knuckles collide with his jaw so hard that they split.  
  
I don’t even feel the pain. Punching Brendon in the face is every bit as liberating as I’d imagined it would be in the precisely one thousand two hundred and seven times I’ve entertained the notion of doing it. Not expecting the impact, he staggers off to the side, a desperate grab at one of the nightstands the only thing keeping him from hitting the floor. I should leave it at that, should just turn around and go, but some sort of floodgate has been dropped in me, doors on a whole writhing cesspool of rage flung open by those two fragile words. Before Brendon has the time to right himself I’ve got one hand bunched up in the front of his shirt, yanking him forward and whirling him around to slam him into the tacky wallpaper with enough force that his back will be a mottled mural of bruises in the morning.  
  
“The hell with your fuckin’ apologies! They don’t mean anything!” I shout, ten miles into his personal space and not giving a single solitary damn about it. It feels like something in me is clawing its way out into the open, some visceral, hateful embodiment of all the darkest corners of my mind come to life. “Don’t you  _dare_  tell me you know what it’s like. Yeah, your family’s dead. So’s mine. But it wasn’t your fault. You weren’t the reason they died. You ain’t got a  _clue,_  kid.”  
  
I should stop. I’m delving too deeply now, digging up all those things I locked away years ago, but it’s like any filter I might have had is gone now, lost in the wake of a numbness so quickly shattered that it leaves me consumed by everything I ever refused to acknowledge. “My mom died tryin’ to pull me out of the way when a Werewolf my dad was huntin’ followed him home. I was ten years old and I watched her get  _ripped apart_  because I was too scared to move. Dad? He kept kickin’ till I was eighteen, made a mistake in my research and told him we were after a Wraith. Turns out it was a Kitsune, and he wasn’t prepared for it. And then it’s too obvious what happened to Z.”  
  
I laugh bitterly even though her name on my lips sends a spike of agony rocketing down my spine. Of all the things I blame myself for, here’s one thing that I can finally put off on someone else. “And I  _tried_  with her. God help me, I tried. I stayed away from Alabama, I begged you not to make me go on that case -”  
  
“I didn’t know!” Brendon shouts back with his own anger painting his voice, but it’s not enough in the face of my all-encompassing rage, the shove he directs at my shoulder barely moving me an inch. “If I... Fuck, Ryan, you have to believe that if I’d have known, I wouldn’t have dragged you into it! I had no idea, okay? When I asked Patrick about it, he said she was dead!”  
  
“I  _LIED_  TO PATRICK.” Accusation bloodies my consonants like the final charge in a battle, my throat aching with the explosive force of the forced confession. Something awful and terrifying swells in me, and I can see Brendon physically pale in the face of it, eyes widening as I slam him back into the wall again and pull my arm back in preparation for another right hook. “I lied to him, I lied to Pete,  _I lied to everyone!_  What was I supposed to do? Go back and tell our friends that I let it happen to her? Walk into a room with William sittin’ there and tell him that the girl he’d watched tacky old movies with a week ago was next on his hit list? Tell ‘em all that Z was a fuckin’  _monster_  because I wasn’t strong enough to do what we’d agreed on from the moment we started workin’ together? It was  _easier_  for her to be dead, Bren. It was easier for all of ‘em, and it was easier for me to try to make myself believe it. A world where Z was dead was still unlivable, but it wasn’t as bad as a world where I’d let her down.”  
  
He blinks up at me in the aftermath, jaw dropping slightly. He knows it all now, things I’d never dream of telling Pete and Patrick, things I even kept from Dean and Spencer. There’s no going back now. The weight of his pity is staggering. “It’s not my fault that you never told me. But for the record, I am so sorry.”  
  
I go ahead and let that right hook fly, cracking across the bruise that’s already blooming on the side of his face. The motion makes me loosen my grip on Brendon’s shirt, which gives him enough room to swing back, an uppercut that doesn’t have enough momentum behind it to really hurt me but still enough to knock me backwards. Something bright-red flashes across my vision, and it’s all sort of a blur after that, a cataclysm of fists and cursing and a few _damn_ good hits on Brendon’s part, deep aching places that settle into my bones with the hum of impending bruises. Pete taught him well, but I’ve still got four inches in height, more muscle even if it’s lean and wiry, and a whole lifetime of experience on my side. The end of the fight comes in the form of bloodstains on the already-dirty carpet, dripping into the worn flooring from my possibly-broken nose and Brendon’s split lip. He’s staring up at me with nothing but challenge in his eyes even though I’m in the perfect position to bash his stupid head in, knees bracketing his hips and an elbow jammed into his sternum to keep him on the floor. A week ago I might have given him a bit of respect for that bravery, but now it just makes me want to hit him harder.  
  
“I don’t  _want_  your sympathy,” I hiss, my mouth sticky and coppery from the outpouring of blood from my nose. Little shit managed to elbow me when I had him in a headlock. “And your supposed common ground is fuckin’  _nonexistent._  Your biggest sin was hidin’ in a bedroom and waitin’ for the end. You don’t have anyone’s blood on your hands, Brendon, and you  _don’t_  know what it’s like livin’ with that. So do both of us a favor and stop tryin’ to psychoanalyze me. I’m too many levels of fucked up for it to work.”  
  
I’m met with silence, a flash of sadness layered across the anger in his eyes that disarms me for a moment. Some fragmented part of my mind muses that Brendon’s almost beautiful like this, sprawled out under me with both of our damaged hearts on bloody display. The thought alone is scary enough to make me forget any pretense I might have had of beating him senseless, clambering hurriedly to my feet and wiping the blood off my face with my shirtsleeve. The quiet is maddening. When I’ve come this far I should at least end it, leave him with some sort of parting blow that will cripple him so badly that I won’t have to feel him crawling around under my skin anymore, but for some reason there’s nothing I can say.  
  
That quiet stays with me for a long time after I leave the motel room with a slammed door and a million unspoken things hanging on the tip of my tongue. That moment where I’d put  _beautiful_  and  _Brendon_  in the same thought stays with me all the way down the road and into the night.  
  
Deep, deep down, I know that it won’t ever leave me.

 

* * *

 

Four hours later, I’m belligerently drunk. No surprises there.  
  
The whiskey is hitting my empty stomach harder than I expected it to, the world tilting on its axis and the flashing lights of the trendy nightclub I managed to find making my consciousness swim. Not that I notice it all that much. I’m a bit preoccupied with shoving my tongue down some moderately good-looking boy’s throat in a shadowed corner, both of us sloppily intoxicated and edging towards one of those one night stands that everyone but me seems to regret. I don’t even remember his name, I realize vaguely somewhere between the muddled thoughts that he tastes like cheap cigarettes and jello shots and that the uptight blonde chick a few feet away who wasn’t appreciative of me hitting on her a while ago can stop staring now, fuck you very much. Do I remember him saying he was a tourist? Maybe? Shit, everyone in here’s a tourist. It’s all a muddle of grating Northern accents miles out of place in Tennessee and the flashing strobes of a hundred camera phones as people bleed their lives out all over a Facebook profile.  
  
Nameless Boy is pretty enough, but maybe that’s just the Jack talking, playing up dark hair and big greenish-blue eyes until they’re something more than what they are in reality. But anyone who knows me would vouch that I’m not picky when I’m in this state, and it’s not so much attractiveness that matters at this point as it is willingness to play along. Far too few people in the world seem to realize that sex and love aren’t mutually inclusive, would slap all sorts of labels of insincerity on me for getting laid after the events of the last few days. It’s just never been that complicated for me, and maybe that’s my sociopathic tendencies showing through, or maybe I’m just more jaded than anyone would believe. I’m hell-bent on forgetting. I’ve got about ten metric tons of aggression pent up from that unfinished fistfight. Nameless Boy is available and willing to the point of palming me through my jeans in some dark corner of a Nashville hotspot, smiling against my mouth when a choked little groan mixes in with the bass line from the dance floor rattling our skeletons. Simple enough.  
  
“Your place,” I mumble hurriedly, not a question but a demand. I’m in no shape to drive, and there’s no way I’m dealing with the fallout that would come from me kicking Brendon out of the motel room at two in the morning with no explanation other than the pervasive smell of alcohol and a painfully obvious boner.  
  
“I’m at the Marriott down the street,” he smirks, nipping at my bottom lip. “Think you can make it that far?”  
  
“I’m drunk, kid, but this ain’t my first rodeo. I can stumble just about anywhere,” I smirk back, letting him take me by the hand and pull me through the pressing crowds that are filling up the dance floor. There’s something off here, but my sense of intuition got knocked off-kilter about four shots ago, so I just decide to go with it. Across the dance floor, pause to make out in another corner, through the lounge area, past the coat check...  
  
Where a hand darts out the door and yanks me sharply to the side.  
  
In two seconds, Nameless Boy disappears into the sea of people, leaving me standing with a faint look of bewilderment in the coat check, wondering what just happened. Ready to mildly bitch at someone to watch where they’re going - he was no great loss. Give me ten minutes and some more booze and I can find a handful more just like him - I turn around unsteadily only to be met with dark eyes and swollen, bruised lips curled into a disapproving frown. “Brendon? The hell’re you doin’?”  
  
“Stopping you from doing something you’ll regret later,” he says with a shrug, leaning against the doorframe. “I followed you. Slightly creepy, I’ll admit, but you’re a danger to yourself and others when you combine sleep-deprived and drunk.”  
  
“I didn’ see you,” I slur confusedly, squinting at him.  
  
“I learned from the best.” I start in on a wide, lazy smile before he continues. “Pete’s a really good teacher.”  
  
“Oh.” The smile dies on my face. “Y’know what, it’s none of your business-”  
  
“Save it. Trust me, if you want to start another fight, I’m pretty sure I’ll win this time,” Brendon snaps, looking disproportionately irritated for a moment before he sighs and rakes a hand through his hair. “Look, just... personal issues aside, you need to come back to the motel and get some rest. You’re not a machine. And psychoanalysis or not, I’m going to go ahead and tell you that it’s a _really_  bad idea to fuck random people in bars as a general rule, much less when you’re in your current situation. So just let me drive you back, okay? You can kick my ass for it later.”  
  
“I can take care of m’self,” I grumble mutinously, trying to yank my arm out of his grasp and only succeeding in stumbling backwards into a coat rack.  
  
“Uh huh,” Brendon deadpans, raising an eyebrow. “Listen, you’ve been taking care of me since the day you found me. Let me take care of you for once. Please, Ryan.”  
  
And there go those two words again, words that gut me, words that can make me do anything if they come from the right mouth. It’s enough for me to let Brendon lead me out of the club and get me into the passenger seat, enough for me to hand him my keys and watch the way the streetlights flicker across his face as we wind back through the streets to the motel. I hope he doesn’t realize that he’s found his ace in the hole now, one thing he can say that will always have the power to undo me.  
  
Those last few shots of whiskey are finally starting to catch up with me, numbing my extremities and sending the world tilting dangerously when I try to get out of the car. Brendon rolls his eyes and practically hauls me into the room, depositing me on my bed unceremoniously and locking the door behind him.  
  
“Bren.” My eyes are fixed on the fascinating whorls in the ceiling, the spot of water damage in the right hand corner. “Bren. ‘M really sorry I hit you.”  
  
“Apologies? You  _are_  wasted.”  
  
“No. No. I mean it,” I say insistently, slapping my hand down on the comforter for emphasis. “I was... I was bein’ a dick.”  
  
“You’re always a dick,” Brendon laughs, having the mercy to pull my shoes off for me before sitting down on the edge of my bed. “I’ve learned to stop taking it personally.”  
  
He’s close enough that I can see the dim light of the lamp filtering through his eyelashes if I tilt my head just right, catching his irises in a way that turns them into molten chocolate, polished mahogany, a color I can’t even fathom a name for. I stare at him for I don’t know how long, trying to think of one, but nothing comes to me other than a mumbled “You got real pretty eyes.”  
  
He laughs again, but there’s something sadder in it this time, something resigned as he stands up and pulls the blankets over me, reaching to switch off the lamp. “That’s the oldest pickup line in the book. Sleep it off, Ross.”  
  
And I do. For the first time in ages, I slip into unconsciousness without the aid of a handful of Ambien, even though it’d be a solid argument to say that I just end up passing out from all the alcohol swimming in my blood. Either way, I sleep. And sleep brings exactly what I was afraid of.  
  
When I wake up screaming in the faint glow just before sunrise, I don’t even remember what the nightmare was about. All I know is that I can’t escape it, can’t shake the terror and guilt gripping me like a vise, shaking and staring blankly ahead at a world that doesn’t make sense. I don’t remember the dream. I don’t remember where I am or who I am or why my world is falling apart.  
  
In the days to come, the only thing I’ll remember about this night is the echo of a memory, my own words whispered back from someone else’s mouth. I’ll remember someone’s steady hands cradling my jaw, their breath a ghost on my lips, their voice the last real thing for me to latch onto.  
  
“Come back to me.”  
  
And maybe, just maybe I’ll remember surrendering to sleep again, curled into someone’s chest with arms wrapped securely around me and a heartbeat thumping reassuringly in my ear.

 

* * *

  
Pete’s standing on the porch waiting for us when we pull into HQ, looking nothing short of irate. For such a little guy, he can hold a ton of rage when he wants to. I sigh, turning off the ignition and waiting for a few seconds before I open my door. Dealing with a nagging session from Pete is just about dead last on Ryan’s List Of Things To Do With A Hangover, and I’m already in bad shape as it is, achy-headed and cotton-mouthed. It was so bad this morning that Brendon actually drove from Nashville to somewhere in Indiana, at which point I insisted that taking the wheel might help a little. The trip to Chicago has been heavy with silence again, but it’s not the uncomfortable, tense kind that carried us from Summerdale to Nashville. It’s a pensive, mutual quiet, one that speaks of an understanding so effectively reached that there’s nothing more to say about it. I don’t even bother asking him not to tell anyone about what happened in Alabama, and perhaps more importantly, what happened last night, what little I can remember of it. For whatever reason, I just know he won’t.  
  
“Have you developed precognition enough to know we were comin’, or were we just unlucky enough to catch you on a smoke break?” I quip, climbing out of the car and bracing myself for the onslaught.  
  
“Jon called this morning to tell me that he saw the Rossmobile flying low up I-65 outside of Louisville,” Pete snaps, crossing his arms and looking at me like I’m something slimy he found on the bottom of his shoe. “You know, because Jon  _calls me._  His dispatcher. Like he’s supposed to. And he  _returns my fucking calls after I leave him ten voicemails!_ ”  
  
“Well, Jon’s a tattletale, and I wasn’t all that interested in talkin’ to you after the shit you pulled with that Werewolf case,” I shrug offhandedly. I didn’t even know I had ten voicemails. Hell, my phone’s probably been dead for two days.  
  
Pete sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, his anger settling into something more like exasperation. “You’re such a child. You could’ve been  _dead,_  Ryan. I had an APB out on you guys after you didn’t come back from the Werewolf thing. Hell,  _Patrick_  was out combing the streets for you. We were freaking out until Brendon deemed it suitable to grace us with a Skype call while you were in Atlanta.”  
  
“Sorry, Mom.”  
  
“You know what, I would hit you, but it looks like someone’s already done the job for me.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he did anyway. Pete looks from me to Brendon incredulously, taking in my black eye and swollen nose, Brendon’s bruised jawline and the thin red line that’s the remnant of his split lip. “Care to share with the class?”  
  
I try to weave a lie together, but Brendon beats me to it, shrugging and playing absently with the hem of his shirt. “We got on the bad side of an Arachne in Atlanta. Didn’t quite work out the way we planned.”  
  
Pete raises an eyebrow. “An Arachne? Like one of the Arachne that spawned from Sam Winchester’s screw-up?”  
  
“Yeah,” I nod, deciding that Brendon’s half-truth is better than any story I could come up with. “We managed to get it, but we ended up gettin’ the shit beat out of us and burnin’ down a warehouse in the process.”  
  
“Fuck, I didn’t know that they’d moved that far South already. I’ll have to call Southeast dispatch and tell them what’s up,” Pete sighs, already looking preoccupied with the task when he turns his attention back to me. “Did you even check your voicemails?”  
  
“Nope. Phone’s been laying dead in the bottom of my bag since we left Chicago.” It’s an unapologetic reply, which only seems to irritate Pete more.  
  
“No skin off my nose. It’ll be Brendon that’s mad at you for it,” he snipes, lighting a cigarette and staring at something invisible beyond the two of us. “Patrick found it.”  
  
I can practically feel Brendon’s body tense up, his head snapping towards Pete in a lightning-fast motion. “What?”  
  
“The thing that killed your family. Patrick figured out what it is, sometime yesterday. I came home and he was flipping his shit, asking if I’d gotten ahold of you yet - hey!”  
  
Brendon practically shoves Pete off the porch in an effort to get through the door, leaving it swinging open behind him. For someone that’s bruised head to toe and has been sitting in a car all day, he moves like a track star. By the time I process what’s going on enough to follow him, he’s already thundering down the stairs, barging unannounced through the door of the library. “What is it?! What did you find?!”  
  
“Nice of you two to drop in,” Patrick says breezily as I finally make it down to shoulder my way into the library and stand next to Brendon. He looks ten kinds of exhausted, bags hanging heavily beneath his eyes behind his glasses, cardigan rumpled, fingers jittering around the handle of a cup of coffee. “Good to know you’re not dead.”  
  
“I’ll apologize later, Patrick, just tell me what you found,” Brendon pleads, looking more alert than I’ve seen him in days. It’s like this has breathed life back into him, brought back the spark in his eyes.  
  
Patrick blinks slowly, but eventually sits his coffee down and waves us over to the desk. “It was actually you that made the connection, Brendon, suggesting that I dig into the Greek mythos a little bit. I hit gold. Well... depends on how you look at it. I may have hit an atom bomb.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“I was right in my assumption that this was something new,” he hums gravely, rubbing at his eyes and staring down at the pile of papers on his desk before looking up at Brendon. “This thing... it’s Evil.”  
  
“Well yeah, I watched it slaughter my whole family, I wasn’t really under the impression that it was the long-lost Care Bear,” Brendon sighs in exasperation, peeking at the papers.  
  
“No, not evil.  _Evil,_  with a capital E,” Patrick explains, looking like he’s trying hard to put it into words. “It’s not an adjective, it’s a moniker. You’re not fighting a monster here, Brendon, you’re fighting the concept itself.”  
  
“Talk English, Patrick,” I snap, his vague description only making my headache worse. “I got a hangover and a low threshold for patience.”  
  
He sighs again, shuffling through the stack of papers and coming up with a worn old book. “There’s a whole field of hunting study on Greek monsters. Lamia, Empusae, that stuff’s all real, but they don’t fit the criteria for what happened to Brendon’s family. So I decided to dig even further back, go to the roots. I found my answers in here.”  
  
Patrick lays the book down on the desk and I snatch it up before Brendon has the chance to, frowning at the title etched in gold onto the cover. “A children’s book of Greek Mythology?”  
  
“Specifically page fifteen,” Patrick nods, waiting for me to leaf through it.  
  
“Pandora’s Box. What about it?” I ask, still not getting it.  
  
Brendon frowns at both of us, peering over my shoulder at the faded illustration in the book. “What, like the story of the girl who opens the box and makes everything suck?”  
  
“That’s one way to describe it, yeah.” Standing long enough to grab the book back out of my hands, Patrick sits it down on the desk and starts running his fingers over the text. “There are variations, of course, it’s one of the world’s oldest legends. But what the lore generally agrees upon is that Pandora was given the box by the goddess Hera, who was jealous of her, and instructed not to open it under any circumstances. Hera knew that Pandora's human flaw of curiosity would make her open the box, and when she did, all the bad stuff in the world was released. It's the Greek equivalent of Eve biting the apple."  
  
"I'm not following you," Brendon says, and yeah, that makes two of us.  
  
"I didn't really think anything of it until I started digging around in some of the old manuscripts of the story, started noticing the differences," Patrick explains, pulling a sheaf of paper covered in odd markings off his desk and pointing to something on it. "See, most of the stories say 'the evils of the world were released,' you know, standard Seven Deadly Sins type of thing. But this one here has a really odd word usage. There's this ancient Greek word for evil, 'Atiria,' and it's weird that it cropped up in the story because the author uses it here like it's a proper noun."  
  
"Okay, your grammar lesson ain't doin' it for me. Cut to the chase," I shake my head and blink down at the gibberish on the paper, unable to stop myself from thinking how nice the bed in the guest room would be right now.  
  
“The chase is that I don’t think it’s just a word, I think it’s a name.”  
  
Brendon looks apprehensive and just a little scared, leaning forward to squint at the paper. “So, when you said ‘Evil,’ you meant...”  
  
“I meant Evil personified, yes. The original Evil. The source of human suffering.” And now I know why Patrick looks so tired. Handling information like that, I wouldn’t be able to sleep either. “There wasn’t any real connection for me to make at first, but my gut told me to go with it. I started scouring for sources, and I found this.”  
  
He slaps another piece of paper down on the table, a high-res photograph of some sort of carving. The stone is covered top to bottom in weird letters that I can’t make sense of, all except an image in the middle, what looks to be a male and female figure standing in front of an open door. The female figure looks to be holding a knife. The male figure looks dead. Brendon looks like he’s about to puke. I frown down at the image, trying to make sense of it. “Okay?”  
  
“This was the only other place I could find that word, ‘Atiria.’ It’s written all over the stone,” Patrick explains, pointing at a series of letters repeated on different parts of the paper. “This is a wall decoration that was found in a cave in Greece in 1824. It dates back thousands of years, but they can’t pin down a precise time on it.”  
  
“What’s a wall decoration doin’ in a cave?” I wonder aloud.  
  
“Exactly. My guess is, someone hid it there. The information on that rock is, well... heavy.”  
  
Brendon pales even more, reaching blindly for one of the armchairs behind him before collapsing into it. “And what does the rock say?”  
  
“Okay, Brendon, I’m begging you to not panic when I tell you this.” And if Patrick’s saying that, the answer can’t be anywhere close to good. “I haven’t translated it fully yet, the dialect is tricky, but from what I can tell, it’s some sort of prophecy... concerning the end of the world.”  
  
“I’m panicking, sorry,” Brendon wheezes, starting to visibly tremble.  
  
“Hey,” I whisper, momentarily forgetting about Patrick and placing a hand on his shoulder, feeling the pulse humming frantically through the veins across his collarbone resonating all the way up my arm. “Breathe. We can’t even be sure this involves you.”  
  
“Actually, we can,” Patrick interjects, prodding at something else in the picture. “Like I said, not a full translation, but I’ve been able to pick out the phrase ‘one of sacred blood’ in here a few times. And if what that thing said to Brendon is true...”  
  
“‘And that special blood of yours is going to blast the gates open forever.’ Oh my God,” Brendon whispers, planting his head in his hands and breathing in erratic gasps.  
  
I don’t know what to make of it. There are connections, sure, red lines on a corkboard, but there are also gaping holes. “But why? What’s so sacred about his blood? Seen it with my own eyes, the kid bleeds just like the rest of us.”  
  
“Well, I did some digging in his family tree - sorry, Brendon - and it seems pretty clean. No Greek in the genealogy whatsoever, no involvement with the occult... but he  _is_  the seventh son of a seventh son.”  
  
“What’s that?” Brendon asks.  
  
“Far as I know, it’s an Iron Maiden song,” I shrug.  
  
Patrick rolls his eyes and starts shuffling through his papers again. “There’s lore that goes way back on it, stating that seventh sons of seventh sons had magical powers, things like that. In reality, it’s not proven, although from my research I can tell that there’s a higher concentration of ESP and psychic ability in both seventh sons of seventh sons and seventh daughters of seventh daughters.”  
  
“How the hell did you get a sample pool of people for that?” My mouth gapes open slightly, imagining all the hours that had to have gone into it.  
  
He shrugs. “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands... hand.”  
  
“But I... I’m not psychic or anything!” Brendon practically squeaks, shrinking back into his chair like he’s trying to shrink away from the harsh reality. “I’m completely normal! Nothing weird ever happened in my life until a few months ago!”  
  
“Yeah, and that begs the question,” I mutter, tracing my finger over the printed lines of the picture. “If this whole end of the world thing is ridin’ on a seventh son of a seventh son, why wait for Brendon? There were tons of ‘em born before him, and with six billion people in the world there’s bound to be more out there. Why zero in on some skinny white boy from Vegas who’s never done anything out of the ordinary?”  
  
“I think it’s a timing thing,” Patrick says, yanking the picture back towards him and pointing as some letters close to the beginning. “There’s this passage here, ‘Evil will rise when her opportunity draws nigh...’ and note the ‘her,’ the gendered pronoun gives my theory some weight. Yeah, ‘Evil will rise when her opportunity draws nigh, seeking one of sacred blood, and by sacrifice thereof shall she open the gates.’ I might be making a translation error, though, because I don’t get the whole thing about gates.”  
  
“Well, it’s something to go on. That’s better than what we had before, which is jack shit,” I admit, leaning over his shoulder and squinting at the paper. “But the gates to what?”  
  
“She’s the embodiment of the forces of Darkness, Ryan. What gates do you think I’m supposed to open, the ones at Disneyland?” Brendon snaps suddenly, his voice making both Patrick and I jump a little. He looks terrified and broken and  _angry,_  curled in on himself like the weight of the world is crushing him.  
  
Despite my best effort to keep my face impassive, my eyes widen a bit as the realization hits me. “You don’t think...”  
  
“I really hope not. But yes, I do think,” he sighs, looking more tired than I’ve ever seen him and raking a hand through his hair. “This Atiria thing obviously has a lot of practice with evil stuff getting out into the world. I think she wants to use me to blow open the gates of Hell. The Underworld. Whatever.”  
  
“That’s pushin’ it a little far, Bren.” I’m trying to calm both him and myself at this point, dismissing his theory even as I think to myself that it makes a lot of sense as far as the end of the world goes. “There are still too many questions and plot holes in this for me to buy it. Why are you the special one? Where’d this prophecy come from? How do we know it’s talkin’ about you? And when did Patrick become fluent in Ancient Greek?”  
  
“He’s the special one because she’s  _obviously_  under the impression that he is if she killed his whole family,” Patrick rattles off the answers like he alway does, sounding like a teacher in a room full of preschoolers. “From what I can tell, the prophecy’s been attributed to the Oracle of Delphi, and that’s pretty reliable as far as prophecies go. I picked up Ancient Greek as a weekend project, and we know the prophecy’s about Brendon because you’re in it too, Ryan.”  
  
I stagger to a halt in my thought process, gaping back at him. “What the hell do you mean, I’m in it?”  
  
“I mean you’re in it. Third column,” he says flatly, jabbing at another few lines. “Loose translation, still working out the finer points, but something along the lines of ‘the vessel of sacred blood shall join with a great warrior and their two fates shall be as one.’ I don’t know of any other seventh sons of seventh sons that have casually bumped into one of the best hunters in the country lately.”  
  
I slip into a long stretch of silence, mulling it over. “Nope. Fuck that.”  
  
“Ryan-”  
  
“ _No!_  There’s not a damn thing you could say that’d convince me that me and  _this_  idiot -" I jab my thumb over my shoulder in Brendon's direction. "Are written in the stars or something. I ain't a piece in anyone's celestial chess game, got it? There ain’t some cosmic storybook holdin’ me to anyone, and I sure as hell ain't in some trippy prophecy that someone found in a cave!”  
  
The thought is terrifying simply because it makes sense. It’s a good way to justify how we managed to run into each other in a forest miles wide. How he saved my life twice. How we've both pulled each other back from the edge of a complete breakdown with nothing more but a simple touch and a whispered  _come back to me._  
  
That red string of fate that everyone always talks about feels more like a hangman's noose.  
  
Patrick looks at me with some sort of silent judgement, saying without words that denial won't do me any good. But denial has been my mode of operation for years, and it's not about to fail me now. Brendon is lost in some train of thought within his own mind, not looking at either of us. I curse under my breath and storm back towards the door, whirling around to fix Patrick with one last warning glare. “Look, y’all can believe what you want. End of the world, some broad that crawled out of a box, Brendon bein’ some kinda chosen one. Long as we can find it and kill it, I don’t really care. But if you’re gonna start talkin’ destiny and intertwined fates, leave me the fuck out of it.”  
  
“You’re reacting rather strongly to this, Ry,” Patrick muses, shooting a knowing look from me to Brendon and back to me again. “Couldn’t be that you’re repressing something, could it?”  
  
“If you’re implyin’ what I think you are, you’re about to buy yourself a one way ticket to me rippin’ off your other hand and crammin’ it up your ass,” I hiss, trying desperately not to notice the blank look on Brendon’s face, not to acknowledge the weird visceral urge that tells me to go to him instead of running away for the millionth time. Stepping out the door makes me feel like I’ve severed something inside of me, left drifting and irrationally alone even though I can still see the two of them sitting there.  
  
“Despite what you believe, we’re in over our heads here.” Pursing his lips, Patrick organizes his papers back into a neat little stack, looking at me expectantly. “Pete and I have done big things before, but not Apocalypse-big. We need help. You know what we’re asking you to do.”  
  
“Yeah, fine, I’ll call Dean here in a bit,” I grumble, turning down the hallway. “I... I heard something rattlin’ around in my transmission on the way up. I’m gonna go work on the car.” 

 

* * *

  
When Brendon walks into the garage a few hours later bearing a huge takeout bag from Mabel’s, the nostalgia is almost comforting. He looks dead on his feet, heavy-hearted to the point it weighs down his steps, but he still manages a smile when I poke my head out from under the Mustang and fumble around to turn the stereo off. Iron Maiden. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I figured the irony in the album was appropriate, but I don’t think Brendon would appreciate it. “Hey. You doin’ okay?”  
  
“Not so much,” he laughs wearily, putting the bag down on the workbench and shoving his hands in his pockets. “How’s the transmission?”  
  
“Just needed tuned up a little, nothin’ big,” I mutter, sliding the rest of the way out from the car’s innards and getting to my feet, wiping the motor oil from my hands off on my jeans. “I just needed to clear my head for a bit.”  
  
“Yeah, me too. I sort of just went out and walked around, figured I’d grab some food in the process. You feeling up to eating?”  
  
“I’m always up for eatin’.” I wonder what I should say to him in the conversation that’s sure to follow, whether I should apologize for leaving him alone with the burden of his supposed destiny. I’ve never been good at picking the right words, so I just settle for diggin my portion of food out of the bag and hopping up to sit on the workbench.  
  
“So, uh... end of the world, huh?” he says in a way that’s far more offhanded than it should be, jumping up to sit beside me and digging into his styrofoam container of fried chicken.  
  
“I guess so,” I nod. Silence. We seem to have a lot of that lately. “Hey, Brendon.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“What I said earlier... it didn’t come out right.” Well, that’s not exactly a new problem. Still, he looks moderately more hopeful at the revelation, and it makes some odd warmth settle over my skin to see his smile look that much more genuine. “I’m not... I don’t regret bein’ in this shitstorm with you. I really don’t. But I’ve got issues with Fate as a concept. I just don’t like it. I promised I’d stick this out with you till the end, and I will. But not because of some stupid prophecy. I’m stayin’ with you because I choose to. I wanted to clear that up.”  
  
Brendon smiles so brightly that it almost blinds me, all of his fatigue vanishing for one shining moment. “That’s the way I’d want it to be anyway.”  
  
“Yeah, me too.” There’s something that can’t be described in words that hangs between us for a moment, but it’s gone as quickly as it came, lost in me jumping slightly when my phone beeps on the counter, indicating it’s done charging. Ten voicemails, each probably progressively angrier. I’ll save them for when I need something to make me laugh. I sigh and flick over to the home screen, pulling up a list of my contacts. “Speakin’ of the end of the world, I got a call to make.”  
  
“Do you want me to leave?” Brendon asks.  
  
“Nah, no point, you’ll be meetin’ him soon enough,” I shake my head, scrolling down the list. There are entries for Dean 1, Dean 2, Dean 3, and Dean 4, but God knows which phones he actually has on him. Shrugging, I go on a whim and select Dean 2, waiting for the dial tone and bringing the phone up to my ear.  
  
Ring. Ring. Ring. Oh well.  
  
Ring. Click.  _“Ross, you son of a bitch!”_  
  
“Hi, Dean,” I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose.  
  
 _“You feel like telling me why Sam got a mass email two days ago from Pete calling a nationwide hunter’s manhunt for your sorry ass?”_  
  
“I... had a bit of an episode, things went off the rails, it’s a long story,” I deadpan into the speaker, practically hearing the scowl on the other end. “Look, you can bitch at me some other time. Where are you at right now?”  
  
 _“Bobby’s. You?”_  
  
“Back at HQ, safe and sound. Listen, I know you and Sam are busy, but I’ve hit something big and I need some help.”  
  
Dean laughs humorlessly on his end of the line, a deep, gravelly rumble that crackles across the distance.  _“We’ve got our hands full too if you haven’t noticed, Ryan. Monsters on parade, civil war in Heaven. How big are you talking?”_  
  
“Apocalypse two-point-oh big.” Dean’s end of the line dissolves into skeptical silence. “I’m not shittin’ you, Dean. We’re lookin’ at the end of the world. Again. Only this time, the crock of shit got thrown in  _my_  lap, and I need some help with figurin’ out what the hell I’m gonna do.”  
  
More silence. A sigh.  _“We can be in Chicago by tomorrow. Shelly’s Diner at noon?”_  
  
“Bring Cas.”  
  
 _“Dude, I haven’t heard from Cas in days!”_  Dean snaps, and I get the immediate feeling that I’ve hit a sore spot.  _“We call, he doesn’t answer. And he’s sure as hell not going to answer for you. He thinks you’re a dick.”_  
  
I frown into the reciever, thinking up a few choice phrases about exactly where Cas needs to shove his halo before thinking better of it. “Fine. Shelly’s Diner at noon.”  
  
 _“You’re buying the pie, asshole.”_  Click.  
  
Grumbling under my breath, I jab at my phone until the screen goes dark, leaning up against the wall with a sigh. “That guy’s one of my best friends, but shit, do I hate workin’ with him.”  
  
“Um, question...” Brendon looks at me strangely, sitting down his food and tilting his head to the side. “Did I just hear you say the world was ending  _again?_ ”  
  
I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s a finite amount of humor left in the world for me. Maybe it’s because I can feel that thing in me that went slack when I walked out of the library tighten again, a pleasant sort of tension that feels like being tethered to something in the middle of a storm. Red string of fate? I’m not quite ready to believe that just yet. But whatever the reason is, I burst into hysterical laughter, clapping Brendon on the back and maybe letting my hand linger on his shoulder longer than I should. “Oh, Bren. You think  _I’m_ an emotionally-stunted asshole with psychological issues? You just wait till you meet the Winchesters.”


	9. Chapter 8 - Dean

We pull onto the exit ramp for Chicago a few minutes ahead of schedule, and I think that a sense of satisfaction is somewhere in my veins alongside the six pack of energy drinks that carried me up the road through the night with not so much as a rest stop. My hands are jittering on the wheel and Sam keeps giving me weird looks every couple of minutes, but it goes without either of us saying that I’ve driven under worse conditions. Most of the talking (arguing) got done in Bobby’s living room last night, and he’s been sulking all the way up I-90 ever since we put Sioux Falls in the rearview and drove headfirst into another steaming pile of spooky crap. And so it goes, the age-old routine of quiet and disapproving looks until he finally snaps at me about how stupid I’m being.

That exit sign must have been Sam’s last straw, because as soon as we pass it he leans back in his seat with a sigh. “Should we really be doing this, Dean?”

“We’re doing this. I’m not taking should or shouldn’t into account right now,” I shrug.

“It’s just… We’ve got a lot on our plate right now.” Leave it to Sam to find a way to say ‘we don’t have time for this shit’ that still manages to be entirely polite. “Don’t you think that Ryan-”

“Ryan wouldn’t have called me if he didn’t need me.” The action of cutting him off earns me a glare, but I don’t really feel the impact of it, weaving in and out of the thickening traffic with my eyes still fixed on the road. “He said ‘Apocalypse Two,’ man. And when was the last time you saw Ryan exaggerate when it comes to stuff like this?”

“Never,” Sam admits grudgingly.

“Exactly. We already dealt with the end of the world once. I don’t really feel like handling it again, so it’d be in our best interests to help Ross shut this thing down before it blows up in all of our faces.” That shuts him up, at least for a little bit. All the caffeine in my bloodstream has made me edgier than usual, coupled with the fact that I haven’t had any real sleep in days and the stress of taking on our own particular shitstorm. When it comes down to End of Days versus the Mother of All Monsters running amok, there isn’t really an easy road to pick.

At any rate, we were - or really, I was - sitting in Sioux Falls with twiddling thumbs and nothing better to do. Bobby and Sam could only research so fast with the limited amount of intelligence we had, and I didn’t want to take any cases too far away in case they stumbled onto something while I was gone. I had South Dakota spook-free in a week. After that, it was nothing but a repeated path between the couch and the fridge, offering to help but getting my head bitten off every time I did. I’ll never admit it, but I was almost relieved when Ryan called. Earth-shattering catastrophes, I can handle. Giving me idle time is something much more dangerous than that.

Chicago passes in a blur of dirty concrete and crowded people, a gray-black smear outside the window. I’m lost in thought as I navigate the turns on auto-pilot, a million things slamming against the inside of my skull and trying to get out. You know that your life’s really gone to hell when the Apocalypse is a good distraction. It’s almost easier for me to push all the things that have been keeping me up at night to the back of my mind - the inevitable fragility of that wall in Sam’s head, how Bobby is more broken than he’ll admit, how I’m not really one to talk when it comes to brokenness in the first place - all of it can go away for a while in the wake of me remembering how tense Ryan sounded over the phone, how tired, how lost. There’s a tiny bit of comfort in thinking that I might be able to help him even though I’m a thousand miles past ever being able to help myself. In the end, isn’t that why we all do this?

Knowing that there’s  _something_  out there that we can fix is what stops every hunter from going completely off their rocker.

“So did Ryan actually say what’s going on, other than that it’s supposedly going to bring about the end of the world?” In the stretch of time I’ve spent locked up in my head, Sam’s pulled out his phone and started to flick through it, opening some internet search app that I can’t make sense of. Itchy trigger finger for research, even on the go. Dweeb.

“He said it was big and that he was in over his head, Sam,” I sigh, turning sharply onto a side street and ignoring a stop sign. “What was I supposed to do? Tell him to soldier up and deal with it himself?”

He shrugs, still immersed in his phone. “You would have told anyone else that.”

“That’s a load of crap and you know it.”

“Is it? Is it  _really?_ ” And there it is. I’ve finally hit the nerve that’s been bringing about the majority of Sam’s bitching on the subject. Brace for impact. “Look, I know he’s your friend and that he’s a good hunter, but… Ryan’s not the most stable person in the world, Dean. And I just can’t see anything good coming from him pulling us into this.”

Whatever the reasoning, it makes me laugh, a humorless bark as I steer us into a pothole-infested parking lot in front of a worn old diner. “It’s the end of the world, Sammy. When does anything good  _ever_  come of that?”

For once in my life, I’ve actually beat Sam at his own logic. That makes him sulky, and he slips into another long stretch of silence, fiddling with the radio as I sit and watch the cars go by on the road outside the windshield, thinking about what he just said. Ryan  _is_  unstable; I know that better than most people. But he wasn’t always. The guy’s mental state has been in the proverbial shitter for the past four years, and I’m not going to judge him for that. After what happened to Z, everything he loved was gone. He acts like a man with nothing to lose because that’s what he is. Unstable? Yes. But dangerous?

And that’s when it hits me. Sam doesn’t like this because Ryan could be either one of us on any given day in the future. He’s a sneak peek into a world that neither of us wants to think about.

As if the universe has read my mind, the dull rumble of an engine hums up the road, announcing the arrival of the ‘65 Mustang pulling into the diner. Same immaculate appearance, same obnoxious shade of red, same skinny son of a bitch behind the wheel. The only difference in the entire visual is in the passenger’s seat. Despite everything, my brain automatically expects to see Z sitting there, all razor-edged smirks and quick wit. Instead, there’s someone new, someone I’ve never seen before.

He waits until Ryan exits the car before following him, stumbling out of the Mustang with an air of unease around him. He’s young, early twenties, maybe. Shorter than me, dressed in jeans and a Star Trek shirt, big eyes and dark, messy hair sticking up at all angles. He looks like a little kid, sticking to Ross’ shadow as the two of them cross the parking lot. There’s something that seems off about this whole thing, but I can’t put my finger on it.

“Look how they’re walking. It’s weird.” Leave it to Sam.

I narrow my eyes a bit, looking closer, and I see what he’s talking about. There’s an odd sort of pattern to how Ryan and the kid move. Perfectly in step, like they’re walking to a beat, and never too far apart. It’s like they’re each constantly checking to make sure the other is still there, fleeting glances and slight alterations to every motion to make sure they’re in sync. I frown, crossing my arms and trying to make sense of it. “Freaky. It’s like…”

“Like gravity,” Sam finishes for me, leaning against the dashboard. We stay like that for a few seconds, the two of us, carefully watching Ryan pull a cigarette out of his pocket and light it halfway across the lot. He doesn’t break the silence until they’re only a few yards off, sighing and reaching for his door handle. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

I sigh and climb out of the driver’s side, hands in my pockets and a tired smile stretching across my face. “You look like hell, Ross.”

“Guess you’d know from experience,” he smirks. I’d punch anyone else for saying it, but before I know it we’re both laughing and pulling each other in for a brief hug. I have to reach up to grab him by the shoulders - he’s almost as tall as Sam, and that’s saying something - pulling back to get a better look at him. Ryan looks every bit as exhausted as I feel, shadows under his eyes and clothes rumpled. There’s something in him that’s hollower than usual. I raise an eyebrow, a silent  _You okay?_

He shakes his head almost imperceptibly. Oh.

“Hey, Ryan,” Sam nods, reaching over to shake his hand before stealing a sidelong glance at the kid. I can practically see the gears in his head turning as he goes down a list of possibilities, trying to slap a label on him before any introductions are made. “And I’m guessing this is our Apocalypse?”

The kid blinks owlishly. “What?”

Shrugging, Sam leans against the passenger side door and gestures vaguely between Ryan and the kid. “There’s the fact that we’ve never met you before, coupled with the fact that Ryan called us in for a favor, which has never happened. And then there’s the fact that he keeps watching you like you’re -”

“And this is Sam Winchester. Sherlock Holmes wannabe, super geek, and part-time moose,” Ryan cuts him off with a look that’s nothing short of murderous, grabbing the kid by the shoulder and steering him back in my direction. “The one that looks like a GQ model with an attitude problem is Dean. Guys, this is Brendon Urie. He’s new. And yeah, he may or may not be our walkin’ Apocalypse.”

“Stop it,” the kid - Brendon - whispers under his breath, elbowing Ryan in the ribs before looking back and forth between Sam and I nervously. “Hi. Um. Yeah, Ryan’s told me a lot about you.”

“Don’t believe half of it,” I snort, rolling my eyes. He’s doing that  _thing_  that people do, the thing where they look at us like we’re either legends or monsters, maybe both. Brendon has a weird quality to the way he looks at you, something penetrating behind his eyes that makes you feel like he’s watching everything that goes through your head. I can’t decide whether or not I like him. I shift my weight onto the front bumper and quirk up one corner of my mouth. “What’d he say, that we kick puppies for fun and cruise around the country taking candy from babies?”

The kid’s eyebrows furrow into a grave, slightly confused expression. “He said that you guys had saved his ass more than once, and if that there’s anyone out there who can help me, it’s you.”

“Christ, Bren, stow it. I can taste the estrogen in the air,” Ryan snipes, starting off his second installment in what I’m sure will be a long round of chain smoking. He frowns around the Marlboro perched between his lips before doing that gravity thing that Sam had pointed out earlier, just slightly modifying the placement of his body, moving a few inches to the left until he’s back inside what most people would probably consider Brendon’s personal space. But Brendon doesn’t seem to mind it, the tension in his shoulders relaxing a bit and the beginnings of a smile hiding somewhere on his face.

Well, I’ll be damned.

“I mean, we’ll certainly try,” Sam says in that calm, consoling voice he always uses for scared civilians. It’s probably better for him to be talking to Brendon, anyway. When it comes to proverbial bedside manner, Ryan and I aren’t the best. “It’d help if we knew what was going on, though.”

Ryan shifts uncomfortably at that, looking between me and Sam with something like apprehension etched into his face. There’s more here going on than he told me on the phone, more than he’s willing to say out in the open. There’s someone here that he can’t tell the whole truth to, and it shows. The only question is who he’s holding that information back from. Is it me? Sam? If I had to bet, I’d say it’s the kid. There’s something protective in how Ryan moves around him, something softer in his voice when he speaks to him. He knows by now that Sam and I can brace ourselves for just about any impact. The three of us are beyond saving, too much time spent in this life to leave any softness in us. If there’s a reason that Ryan hasn’t spilled the beans yet, it’s that he doesn’t want Brendon to be around when he does.

And right on track with my assessment, he grinds out the cigarette under his boot and hands Brendon the keys to the Mustang. I raise an eyebrow and Sam tilts his head - I never even saw Ryan let Z touch the steering wheel of that car, let alone some rookie who may or may not bring about the end of the world. What’s more, Brendon takes the keys like he’s used to it, even though he looks just as confused as I do until Ryan clears it up for him. “You and Sam should go back to HQ, Brendon. Sam and Patrick need to talk if he’s gonna get any kinda research work done. It’s weird genius stuff; I don’t feel like messin’ with it. Dean and I’ll stay here and catch up and I’ll give him the English version of what’s goin’ on.”

Brendon turns to him with that weird, penetrating look again, staring at him silently for a few seconds until he’s apparently satisfied with whatever he’s found. I can see Ryan physically sigh in relief after he turns away - apparently he’s used to more of an argument than this - breaking that gravitational closeness they’ve had by staying where he is as Brendon walks over and extends his hand in Sam’s direction. “Nice to meet you. I’m a good driver, I promise.”

“I spend ninety percent of my time in a car with Dean,” Sam snorts, shaking his hand and falling into step with him as they walk back over to the Rossmobile. “By this point, a ‘good driver’ is anyone that doesn’t go eighty in a fifty-five and pretend they’re in Tokyo Drift when they get bored.”

“That was one time,” I grumble defensively, but neither of them hear me above the smooth growl of Brendon starting the Mustang’s engine. Sam folds himself into the passenger’s side, and they peel smoothly out of the parking lot. I can’t help but notice that Ryan watches the car up until the moment it disappears around the corner.

“We’re not going to the diner, are we?” I ask.

Ryan sighs and shakes his head, running a hand over his face. “Bar food all right with you? I ain’t had a drink since Nashville and God knows I need one.”

“It’s half past noon.”

“You got a problem with that?”

I smirk and shake my head, heading back to the driver’s side. “Never.”

We end up at some Irish pub two blocks over that’s more restaurant than bar, but it’s open, and that’s score one for us. Ryan sits in the passenger seat looking blankly forward, so out of it that he doesn’t even move when I pull my keys out of the ignition and swing my door open. “Hey, Ross.”

“Yeah, sorry, I’m comin’,” he mumbles absently, getting out of the car in a tangle of lanky limbs. He looks… disconnected. Like he’s not running up to speed with the world around him, something off-kilter in his mind that slows him down and makes him less sharp than he normally is. In any other walk of life, you could chalk it up to a bad day. In ours, it’s an accident waiting to happen.

I hang back, watching him disappear through the door, completely oblivious to the fact that I didn’t follow him. Something’s up with Ryan. I knew that from the second I saw him get out of his car, maybe even from the second I saw his name on my caller ID, but I had no idea it was on this level. The Ryan I know is all grit and gasoline and blazing extremes, quick to anger but also quick to forgiveness, equally likely to slap you on the back or punch you in the face. This guy? He’s a ghost. And I can’t help but feel that it has something to do with the kid that’s currently driving the Mustang and my little brother God-knows-where. For the first time, I’m struck with the thought that Brendon the Walking Apocalypse might be a little more sinister than I gave him credit for.

Something twists in my gut. My fingers twitch toward my phone, Sam’s number already on their tips. I grit my teeth and swallow, slamming my door shut and following Ryan into the pub. Ghost or not, I still trust his judgement. He trusts Brendon, and so will I until he gives me a reason not to. Why do I feel like that’s going to come back and bite me in the ass?

By the time my eyes adjust to the low lighting inside, Ryan’s already settled into a table back in the most secluded corner the place has to offer, nursing a glass of whiskey with a distant, preoccupied look on his face. There’s an open bottle of Sam Adams waiting in front of the chair on the opposite side of the table. Bless him.

“You know my beer preference. People will say we’re in love,” I joke, but I’m only met with a weary glare in response. Ryan doesn’t have the most lively sense of humor on his best day, but right now he’s the textbook definition of a wet blanket. I roll my eyes and flop down in the chair, taking a long swig before thunking the bottle down on the old wood and looking at him intently. “All right, tell me what the hell’s going on. You look like you haven’t slept in a week, you’re completely clocked out, and something is  _definitely_  up with that kid. Bring me up to speed.”

“If I tell you everything, we’ll be here all day,” Ryan grumbles, twirling his glass around on the table with a vague frown. “I been puttin’ up with more shit in the past month than I have in the past five years, man. It’s startin’ to wear on me.”

I shrug, tilting my chair back in its back two legs. “I can sit here all day. Sharing is caring, Ross. Start from the beginning.”

“What beginning?!” Ryan snaps suddenly, slamming his hand down with a force that rattles the table and fixing me with a murderous look. “There’s different ones. You want the beginning where I found some kid in the woods in Minnesota and now he’s supposedly carryin’ the End Of Days in his blood?! How ‘bout the one where Spencer’s up and dropped off the face of the Earth and I got nothin’ to tell me where he is except a faint sense of impendin’ doom and the fact that it’s probably my fault?! Oh, I know, Dean. Let’s start with the one that links back to you. Like how you  _swore_  you’d keep tabs on Jack’s little bloodsucker club, tell me if they were on the move. Let’s talk about how you didn’t tell me shit for a  _year,_  and how I just happened to run into Z in Summerdale four days ago. Let’s start with that.”

I blink at him slowly, my bottle still frozen halfway to my mouth. “You saw Z?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says softly, draining the rest of his glass and grimacing. “Thanks for the heads-up on that.”

I’m one of three living people that knows what really happened in Mobile that night. The biggest Vampire nest in the South sounded like a good weekend project four years ago, but Sam and I knew we couldn’t do it alone. Bobby managed to get us a hookup with some people he claimed were the best hunters below the Mason-Dixon line, a three-person team who specialized in risky cases. Two of them were Summerdale Hunters, born and bred, and that name alone served as their credentials, at least in Bobby’s book. The other one was some girl from California, had a reputation for tipping her nails in silver and roundhouse kicking poltergeists with iron-tipped stillettos. That whole trip to Alabama, I sat in the driver’s seat with my eyes repeatedly darting over to the piece of paper taped to the dash, three names in Bobby’s messy handwriting that I never would have imagined I’d get so tangled up with - Ryan Ross. Spencer Smith. Z Berg.

I’d laughed at how young they were the first time I met them. Ryan and Z were just barely twenty, stupidly in love and constantly clinging to each other, and Spence was fresh off his high school graduation walk. This was the elite task force we’d signed up to work with? I was almost pissed about it until later that night, when things went sour and Ryan stopped some bloodsucker from ripping my throat out, took down three of them in less than five seconds. Between swinging a machete and trying to find Sam in all the carnage, I thought to myself that all the talk about those Summerdale boys couldn’t be too much bullshit after all.

We all saw Z go down. This particular nest had a penchant for turning rather than killing, and we knew that. Ryan had run across the warehouse to get me, was too far away when we saw the bloody fingernails rip her throat wide open. It was too late, but we still fought off what was left of the nest long enough for him to go to her, hold her hand as she faded out. In the end, it was me who dragged him outside, kicking and screaming at us all to let him go back.

Two hours and an empty bottle of Jack later, Spencer, Sam, and I were sworn to secrecy. We all knew what had really happened, but as far as the rest of the world knew, Z was dead. I remember Ryan’s slurred whisper in the musty darkness of a motel room that night, bouncing off the walls while we all looked at him like he was some sort of volatile explosive.  _I hope she is. My God, I hope she bled out before she could change. What’ve I done? I promised her, right from the start I promised that if… Oh God, what’ve I done?_

I think he held onto that hope even after I promised to track the nest for him, keeping my distance but monitoring their movements. The numbers were down to practically nothing after Mobile, and they didn’t recruit any more, staying under the radar. When I called to tell him that I’d seen Z packing up a van with air mattresses and suspicious-looking coolers a year later, all I heard on the other end of the line was silence.

Silence like what grips him right now, staring into the bottom of his empty glass like he’ll find some comfort there.

I’m walking on eggshells as I choose my next few words, eyes fixed on my bottle while I ask a question I don’t really want an answer to. “What did you -”

“I did what I should’ve done in the first place.” Ryan’s voice is dead, a hollowness to the sound that shouldn’t be physically possible. “And I’m not sayin’ any more on the matter. I just thought you oughta know.”

A cute blonde waitress walks by and drops off fresh drinks for both of us. I sigh and watch Ryan go right to town on that second glass. Let it not be said that our friendship wasn’t born of kindred spirits. We’ve got a similar way of dealing with the rough patches in life. “I’m so sorry, man.”

“Don’t apologize. You were out bein’ normal for a year. I can’t fault you for that.” I can’t tell if the bite in his voice is bitterness, sarcasm, or some mixture of both. Ryan’s hands are shaking visibly, the whiskey in his glass jittering as he sets it back on the table and rakes his fingers through his hair, exhaling heavily. “I don’t even… I shouldn’t’ve brought it up. It ain’t why we’re here.”

“Yeah, I didn’t figure… so if you don’t mind me asking, what’s up with the kid?” Cute Blonde from earlier is giving us both the come-hither eyes. Any other day, I’d go slip her my number. Bigger fish to fry right now.

“Who, Brendon?” Ryan mutters, playing with the coaster he’s entirely neglecting to use. “That’s the really long story. You might wanna fasten your seatbelt, Winchester, because it’s a hell of a ride.”

“Consider me clenched up and ready to go,” I say, rolling my eyes as Ryan grabs his journal out of his backpack, leafing through it and slapping it on the table in front of me. It’s a few-page spread with ‘Brendon Urie’ written in large, spidery letters at the top. The more I read, the wider my eyes get. “And you just  _found_  this kid?”

“I was out in Minnesota takin’ care of a Wendigo,” he explains. “Walkin’ through the woods, mindin’ my own business, and I found him hidin’ in the bushes with an old twenty-two and a duffel bag. That was all he had to his name. No family, no place to go. After I found out what happened to his folks I couldn’t just leave him.”

“Yeah, Ryan Ross’ Home For Wayward Supernatural Orphans, I get it.” I run my fingers carefully over the indentations that Ryan’s pen made in the paper, over days and days of observations, new discoveries. “What I want to know is what the hell this Atiria thing is that you have penciled in here at the end. Is it some sort of demon?”

He rubs a hand across his jaw, one long finger tapping at the last few notes on the paper. “Atiria’s our whole problem. I took Bren on the road to train him up a bit last week, and Patrick finally tracked down what killed his family. It’s this thing. Lore says she’s the original Evil, crawled out of Pandora’s box millenia ago and has been makin’ mischief ever since.”

“So why does she want Brendon?” I ask, frowning. “He seems like a pretty good kid. Kinda awkward, kinda hyperactive, but not anything that the Empress of Darkness would want to mess with. What’s her motive?”

“This.” Ryan fumbles around inside his jacket for a bit before coming up with a folded piece of paper that he hands to me. I pull it open and squint down at the contents, a printed picture of some stone carving with notes all over the white portions of the paper, elegant script that looks like Patrick’s. “It’s a prophecy some archaeologists found in Greece a while back. It’s the only written information linked to Atiria, but it explains why she’d want Brendon.”

It takes a while of muttering down through Patrick’s translation before I hit anything of value. “So that’s him? ‘One of sacred blood?’”

“He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, but Pete hasn’t gotten any more than that out of his family tree yet.” He’s frowning deeply now, his bottom lip clamped between his teeth and a dark look in his eyes. “But I ain’t too bothered about why his blood’s special. It’s what this bitch wants to do with it that’s the problem.”

I nod and start reading down through the translation again.  _Evil will rise when her opportunity draws nigh, seeking one of sacred blood, and by sacrifice thereof shall she open the gates. The hope of the world lies in the vessel of sacred blood, for he shall join with a great warrior and their two fates shall be as one with each other, shall be as one with the fate of all. Their victory will bring peace to all. Their defeat will bring the destruction of mankind._

Shit.

“Ryan, tell me this isn’t what I think it is. This thing about gates. Tell me it doesn’t mean -”

“Hell?” he finishes for me, shrugging and waving Cute Blonde over to switch out his empty glass for a full one. “That’s what Patrick and Brendon both think it is.”

There’s something odd about that phrasing. “And what do  _you_  think?”

And there’s the soft spot. Ryan practically crumbles, curling in around his drink and looking so bone-deep  _tired_  that it takes me aback for a second. When he finally opens his mouth, he sounds horribly, hopelessly lost. “I don’t know, Dean. I  _wanna_  think that this whole prophecy thing is bullshit. Patrick says I’m in it, that I’m this warrior guy and I just… I don’t want that. I don’t wanna believe in Fate, because if what this stupid rock says is true, it means…”

“It means that you and Brendon are the only thing standing between Atiria and the mother of all shitstorms if she manages to blow the gates of Hell open.” Nodding mutely, Ryan curls in on himself even more, retreating from the idea. And suddenly, it clicks. That weird, gravitational way he and Brendon hovered around each other without either of them seeming to notice it. The sense of disconnection Ryan adopted from the second the Mustang rolled out of the parking lot. How worried he looks over someone he’s only known for a month tops. I let out a low whistle, shaking my head. “That’s heavy. I hate to tell you, man, but I’ve  _been_  part of a prophecy, and this seems legit. It’ll be easier if you accept it now.”

“Yeah, because that’s  _exactly_  what you did the last time the world was supposed to end,” he snipes, shaking his head like I'm the one not making sense here.

“Hey. I  _accepted_  that I was part of a bigger plan. I just made the decision that the plan was stupid and rewrote it,” I retort, pointing a finger at him. “You’re not even acknowledging that you factor into this. How can you expect to change something when you’re sticking your head in the sand and swearing you don’t even have a dog in the fight? This hunk of rock says that you have a role to play in this whole Apocalypse thing. It’s your call what that role is. It’s your call what your options are.”

Ryan exhales shakily, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. He looks simultaneously younger and older, a weight on his shoulders that doesn’t match the flash of vulnerability that skates across his face, gone as quickly as it came. “I don’t know too much about options right now, but as far as my role goes, I got a feelin’ that I’m s’posed to protect Brendon. That’s my job in all of this.”

“You must care about that kid, Ross,” I muse around my last sip, the empty bottle hitting the table with a hollow thud.

Ryan snorts, taking a swig of his whiskey and looking even more pissed-off with the world than he usually does. “What makes you think I give a damn about him?”

“Because you’re a piss-poor liar.” Shrugging, I look down at the journal, all of those meticulous notes and careful observations. “And if you didn’t care about him, you’d be doing the smart thing. The kid’s got magic blood that could blow Hell wide open? The logical course would be to kill him before Atiria gets her hands on him, and you know it.”

“That’s not an option, Dean,” Ryan growls, suddenly on the defensive. “That’s never been an option.”

“I rest my case,” I say placatingly, putting my hands in the air. “Me and Sammy are with you on this a hundred percent, Ryan, but I’d appreciate it if you’d spare me the lone-ranger bullshit when we both know it’s not true.”

He doesn’t say anything else for a long time, looking at his reflection in his drink before offering a quiet rebuttal. “I don’t care about him. He saved my life, and I owe him a debt. But I don’t care about him. Brendon can do whatever the hell he wants once we get the Atiria situation handled. I don’t care.”

His heart’s not in it. He’s not even making an  _effort_  to deny it. Probably at the phase where he’s stopped lying to everyone else because he’s having so much trouble lying to himself. Poor bastard.

“Okay, so you’ve already thrown out the easy way.” It’s probably better for me to change the subject at this point, since Ryan’s looking closer and closer to diving across the table and punching my lights out for even  _suggesting_  said easy way. “Have you thought of any options you are willing to go with?”

“Well there’s only one, ain’t there?” he says, looking at me like I’m stupid. “Kill her. Track the bitch down and gank her before she can get her hands on Brendon.”

“Yeah, but my guess is that it’s easier said than done.” I think back to all the hell Sam and I went through with Yellow Eyes, with Lilith, with Alastair. And they were demons. They were the _servants_  of Evil, and taking the upper-level ones out nearly killed us every time. Ryan’s looking at tangling with the Big Kahuna herself, or at least that’s what I can assume. With Lucifer back in the cage, she’s the closest thing that the bad guys have got to a rallying point. The first, the original, the ultimate. I have a pretty solid feeling that holy water and exorcism chants and silver aren’t going to do much good. “Any guesses on how you’re going to kill her?”

“Well, yeah. That’s why I called you, actually.” Ryan looks somewhat nervous now, and I don’t know why. “I’m gonna shoot her with the Colt.”

I groan, burying my face in my hands. Somehow I knew it was going to come to this. Ryan’s a phenomenal hunter. It’s in his blood. He didn’t need my advice. He needed my arsenal. Specifically, a piece of my arsenal that I no longer have. I still remember every detail of that night in Missouri, how I’d been in such a panic by the time Cas yanked Sam and I out of there that I hadn’t even thought about the gun until it was too late, the two of us standing in Bobby’s living room with nothing to show for it other than our most valuable weapon gone and Ellen and Jo’s blood on our hands. Hell, if we had the Colt now, our entire Mother of All problem would be solved. And if Ryan’s entire strategy was riding on it, that’s one more monkey wrench in the gears that we need to work around.

“Look, Ryan…” I start, not really knowing how to word it. He’s volatile right now, teetering on the edge of a breakdown, and I don’t know what the destruction of his last hope might do to him. “There might be other ways to kill her, but the Colt… that’s not possible now. When we were fighting Lucifer, I ended up dropping the gun. It’s gone. We’ll never see it again.”

And to my surprise, he  _laughs._  Ryan cackles like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Maybe he’s finally lost it. He keeps laughing even as he polishes off his third whiskey and slams the empty glass back down on the table, the alcohol and mirth finally lighting up something behind his eyes that had been dead before. “What, you mean you’ll never see this gun again?”

He subtly shifts so the waitress can’t see us, opening one side of his jacket - and there it is. I’d know it anywhere, the shape, the details, the worn spots on the grip where so many hands had fought off the nastiest things Hell could throw at them. My jaw drops. “Where the  _fuck_  did you get that?”

“I didn’t,” Ryan smirks, closing his jacket and patting the place where the Colt rests fondly. “Spencer did. He always did have a fondness for thrift shoppin’. After that tragedy in Carthage, Missouri, I sent him out to go combin’ estate sales lookin' for some stuff up our alley, and sure enough, look what he found. Brought it back to HQ, dropped it there for examination, had no idea what it was. Pete did, though. He’s been keepin’ it locked up in his office ever since. I weaseled it out while he was on a conference call with Joe and Andy this mornin’.”

Something hot and angry flashes under my skin. “And how long has Pete been holding onto  _my_  gun?”

“About six months?”

“That smarmy son of a bitch -”

“Don’t be mad at him, Dean,” Ryan cuts me off, grabbing my arm and pulling me back into my chair. I’m half inclined to yank it out of his grip and drive straight to HQ to turn Wentz’s smug little face into my new punching bag, but I decide to give Ryan the benefit of the doubt. “Look, the word about what happened with Sam’s soul? It got around. Pete wanted to give the gun back. It was me that convinced him to hold onto it.”

“Why would you do that? Do you know how much easier our lives are with that thing?” I hiss, the direction of my anger suddenly shifted.

“I know that the Colt’s a useful weapon,” he shrugs, fiddling with his lighter and shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “But it’s also a dangerous one. You know what Sam was like soulless. Do you really think it would’ve been a good idea, puttin’ that kinda power in his hands?”

My eyes narrow, fists clenched in my lap. “That wasn’t your call to make, Ryan.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He doesn’t look sorry at all. Asshole. “But since the situation’s in my favor here, I’m gonna cut you a deal. You come with us and help out. We kill Atiria, and as soon as she’s dead I give you the gun back, no questions asked. You go use it on your Mama Monster, and we all live happily ever after. It’s a win-win, right?”

“That’s not a deal, that’s coercion,” I growl, throwing my hands up in exasperation. “It’s not your gun to give or take.”

“Coercion? You sound like Sam,” Ryan snorts.

“You’re drunk and making a massive dick move. Give you five seconds to figure out who  _you_  sound like.”

The amused smirk dies on his face. Yeah, I went for a low blow. Ryan’s always been kind of touchy where the subject of his dad is concerned, same as Sam and I are. It was always a sort of unspoken taboo between all of us. Don’t say anything too emotional, don’t talk about Z, don’t talk about our parents. Three simple rules. For a long stretch of time, he’s quiet, his face kept carefully impassive. Then out of nowhere he’s all quick, practiced motion, his mouth setting into a hard line and his hand darting inside his jacket. I reel backwards, head racing along with my heart. Apparently Sam was right about Ryan being unstable, and that’s a horrible last thought to have, that my little brother was right in his judgement of someone where I wasn’t. Sure, I’d said some things below the belt and was effectively jeopardising his plan, but  _shooting_  me? Shooting one of a handful of people in the world that he might consider a friend? I always knew Ryan Ross could be a cold-hearted son of a bitch at times, but I never once thought that it would be the end of me.

A second passes. Two. There’s no bullet in my skull. Ryan’s expression hasn’t changed.

I chance a quick look underneath the table. The Colt is held flat in his palm, extended towards me. When I look back up at Ryan, confused and still slightly terrified, he sighs. “You’re right. This is yours. I ain’t gonna hold it over your head. I’m gonna give you back your gun and hope to hell that you’ll decide to help me out. I’m sorry, Dean, I just…”

“You just got desperate, and you panicked. Can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing,” I shrug, reaching forward and grabbing the gun out of his hand. The cool metal feels familiar, the worn wood of the grip conforming to my hand when I slide it into my waistband. I would have done exactly the same thing, truth be told. Only if the situation were reversed, I would have stuck with the coercion plan. Leverage is more reliable than trust, and it would have gotten the same result. Ross is a bigger man than he gives himself credit for. It’s admirable, even if his moral compass is going to get him royally screwed someday. “You know Pete’s going to skin you alive for stealing this out of his office, right?”

“I been puttin’ up with Pete and his bitchin’ for years. He don’t scare me,” he grins, and before we know it, we’re both laughing. Cute Blonde offers another round of drinks and Ryan opts for a Jack and Coke instead of straight booze this time, apparently loose enough to talk frankly with me now.

“We’ll help you,” I tell him a few minutes later, running a hand through my hair and sighing. I’ll never hear the end of it from Sam. “Even if you are an underhanded little shit.”

Ryan smirks lazily and raises his glass in my direction. “Always with the compliments, Dean. I’m blushin’ like a dainty Southern Belle.”

“That’s because you’re half-hammered and the blood’s going to your head, you ass.” We both sputter into laughter again. I missed this. I forget sometimes that I have friends outside of Sam and Bobby and Cas, and God knows none of them are up for shooting the shit over day drinking and a football game playing on the TV in the background. It’s been so long since I’ve had Ryan around that I hadn’t remembered how nice it can be when he is. “I’ve got to hand it to you, though, the estate sale thing was smart. I don’t get why you and Spencer never opened your own dispatch.”

“I’m not much of one for desk work,” Ryan says offhandedly, something sad crossing his expression at the mention of Spencer. “And with Spence gone, I’m definitely not gettin’ into it.”

“Well, if you ever get tired of Chicago, you could always head out to Sioux Falls after this is over.” It’s an offer I’ve made him a thousand times. He never takes it. Some part of me thinks that even though he’s finally allowed himself to have a few friends, Ryan’s still scared of being anything but alone. He’s forgotten how to be anything else. “Sam and I’d love to have someone else working that beat. We could hang out more, work some cases together. Bobby always needs more people out that way.”

He laughs humorlessly, raising an eyebrow at me across the table. “After what happened in Tulsa, Bobby Singer won’t even look me in the eye, much less agree to be my new dispatcher. Pete and Patrick are good to me. I’ve always got backup when I call for it and a bed when I need it. They’re the best kind of people. Better’n I deserve, at any rate. Besides, Bren’s taken a real shine to ‘em.”

“Ugh, let’s not talk about Tulsa,” I cringe, but my expression slowly works its way into a wicked grin, aimed at him over the rim of my bottle as I take a long drink. “I thought you said you didn’t care what Brendon did after we got this whole Atiria thing taken care of.”

“I… I don’t,” Ryan sputters, waving me off like I’m an annoying gnat rather that the hated voice of truth. “I’m only sayin’ that he’s a hunter now, he’s in the life even after we kill Atiria. He’ll need a territory, he’ll need a dispatcher…”

“He’ll need a partner.”

“Fuck off, Dean.” By now, I can feel his glare boring a hole through my head.

“I’m only  _sayin’_ ,” I drawl in a pretty good imitation of Ryan’s Alabama-isms, quietly laughing to myself as he gets progressively more riled up. “If you don’t care what he does, why does it matter that you’re on the same dispatch as him after we close the book on this case? And the way you were looking at him earlier sure as hell didn’t seem like someone who doesn’t care.”

“It  _doesn’t_  matter!” Ryan half-shouts, wadding up a napkin and throwing it at my head. He seems to realize that me getting a rise out of him is only serving to prove my point after a second, though, eventually slumping back into his seat with a weary look about him and scratching nervously at the back of his neck, voice softened. “He’s just… he’s a good kid. Brendon’s a really good kid, and he didn’t ask for none of this, and I don’t wanna see him gettin’ hurt, is all.”

Since when does Ryan “Get The Hell Outta My Way” Ross give a damn about anyone else’s personal merits? He’s got his own pretty solid moral system and sense of honor, yeah, but I’ve _never_  seen him read into anyone else’s sense of right and wrong. He’s seen good people die. He’s seen assholes die. He’s seen so many people die that he’s come to the realization that it doesn’t  _matter_  how good or bad you are. Everyone dies, and sometimes people die bloody. I’ve heard him say things along those lines all the time whenever Sam starts on his bullshit about how virtuous people deserve to be happy, and that’s why I don’t buy it now. Brendon might be a good kid, but that’s not why Ryan moves around him like the planets around the sun, like a magnet drawn to something behind his eyes. I’m not the most perceptive person in the world, but I’m a damn sight more perceptive than Ryan Ross thinks I am. I know what’s going on here.

But I won’t call him on it. Some things you just have to work through on your own.

“Fair enough,” I concede, subconsciously biting my tongue and making a note to really get the third degree on this Brendon kid later. Ryan might not be family, but he’s close enough to it that I still feel the need to place a stamp of approval on our Walking Apocalypse’s forehead. “And killing the thing that’s out for his blood is a good way to keep him from getting hurt. Please tell me your plan is more detailed than just ‘shoot her with the Colt,’ dude, I can’t do  _all_  your work for you.”

“Give me some credit.” With an over-dramatic roll of his eyes, Ryan reaches forward and flips a few pages in his journal, pointing out some more blocks of writing with Brendon’s name over them. “I’ve got a few options lined up, but this here’s lookin’ like our best bet. I made Brendon a the strongest hex bag I could the night I found him. I don’t know whether that’s keepin’ him hidden from Atiria or if she’s just out there bidin’ her time, but there’s enough mojo in that thing to throw off Angel tracking, so I’m bettin’ it can at least garble her signal a little bit.”

“Since when do you make hex bags?” I ask, impressed.

“Since that one you made me saved my ass on that coven case two years ago,” he shrugs, flipping over to the next page. “Had Patrick teach me a few ones even y’all don’t know about. But anyway, here’s what I’m thinkin’. Whatever this window of opportunity she has is, it’s gettin’ close. She wouldn’t send Bren on the run for years, not with everything that could happen to him. He could die on the streets or somethin’. His blood would be wasted if that happened. So wherever she is, she’s probably gettin’ desperate. She wants him, she wants him alive, and she wants him by whatever the time frame is for this ritual she’s gotta do to blow Hell open. So my idea is that we take Brendon somewhere out in the country, you and me and Sam. Get him away from any major population centers, take that hex bag off him, and burn it. If Atiria’s as desperate as I think she is, she’ll come runnin’ the second he pops up on her radar. So she’ll zap in, wantin’ to grab Brendon, and I’ll shoot her. The end.”

I look at Ryan uncertainly, eyes flicking from the journal back to him several times. “That’s it? No backup plan? What if she pops in expecting foul play? What if she knows exactly what we’re planning? What if she doesn’t show up at all?”

“I’m workin’ with what I got here, okay?” he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Unless you got a summoning ritual and a devil’s trap for Ancient Greek entities up your ass that I don’t know about, this is the best way I can think of to get her to somewhere that I can put a bullet in her. Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong,” I tell him placatingly, reaching across the table and laying a hand on his shoulder. “Your plan’s just got some holes in it. Some risky holes. Sam would say that it has too many independent variables or some shit, I don’t know. All I know is that you’ve got a big margin for error in this, Ry, and you’ve got nothing to fall back on if things get squirrelly. It’s your call whether or not you want to take that risk.”

I don’t even know why I brought the concept of risk up to him. It’s not like Ryan understands it anyway. That’s his main downfall as a hunter. He’s so goddamned stubborn that he can’t see a situation going any way except for the way he wants it to go, and he never makes backup plans because of it. Being stupid and reckless is all well and good as long as you have an out, but Ryan never does. It’s pure, stupid luck that’s kept him from a nasty end so far, but with something this big, I can’t see luck being on his side. He’s out of his depth the same way that Sam and I were with the last Apocalypse, only in this case, he’s fighting something that’s much harder to pin down. Lucifer  _wanted_  to be on the radar. From what I can tell of Atiria, sneak attacks are more her style.

He looks like a man with the whole world on his shoulders when he finally drags his eyes back to mine, a face that I thought was boyish the first time I ever saw it etched with lines that have made an appearance years before their time. “I just don’t know what else to do, Dean. I can’t think of a better way. I’m twenty-four years old and I got the end of the world sittin’ in my lap, tickin’ away like a bomb. I don’t know what to do with it. I just wanna shut it down while I still can.”

“Yeah, well, there’s no good way to handle the end of the world,” I admit, polishing off what’s left of my beer and spinning the empty bottle forlornly on the table. “There’s going to be collateral damage, Ryan. There’s always collateral damage with stuff like this.”

He shudders. “I know. And I’m just sittin’ here hopin’ we can dodge the the blast, y’know? I’m sorry about the collateral damage, but I don’t want any of us to  _be_  collateral damage. Is that selfish?”

“Depends on how you look at it,” I shrug, hopping off my seat and reaching for my bag. “If you’re one of the people you’re trying to save, it’s heroic. If you’re one of the people you’re deflecting that misery onto, it makes you a cowardly son of a bitch. You just have to pick what you are, I guess. It’s your perspective on yourself that’ll matter at the end of the day.”

“And how did you see yourself after you stopped the end of the world?”

I avoid his eyes, looking at the floor as I throw the strap of my duffel over my shoulder and toss two twenties on the table. “Not too well.”

I can feel Ryan’s contemplative frown even though I can’t see it, a pensive silence as he tucks his journal back into his backpack and follows me out of the pub. We stand out on the front stoop for a few minutes while I’m in the process of deciding whether or not I’m good to drive, still quiet, lost in our own separate seas of thoughts. Ryan burns through one, two, three cigarettes, and the smell goes to my head, reminds me of those few nights in Mobile before everything went to hell, Z laughing, Sam and Spencer playing darts, Ryan handing my ass to me in poker hand after hand while explaining that his old man had taught him how to hustle when he was a kid for extra cash. From that to back-to-back Apocalypses, all in four years. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in a hurricane.

“When you called me, you asked me for advice,” I finally say, digging my car keys out of my pocket and deciding that the worst I’ll do in my current state is bang up someone’s bumper if I’m not careful.

Ryan looks up with a startled jump, flicking his cigarette onto the ground and grinding it out. “Yeah. Got any?”

“When you have two people facing the end of the world, every odd in the universe says that at least one of them isn’t going to make it out,” I offer quietly, walking alongside him to the car and leaning against the front bumper. “So you need to play to the odds. You have to make a decision right now, right this minute. And I don’t want you to tell me what you decide, because it’s not for me. It’s for you. You need to decide right now which one of you is going to walk out of this alive, you or Brendon. And after you decide, you need to base every decision you make from now on with that one decision in mind, or else everything is going to crash and burn and the world will end and there’ll be nothing you can do to stop it.”

He breathes out shakily, closing his eyes, and I just stand and watch. Ryan stays like that for a long time, hands balled up in his pockets and eyes screwed shut. When they finally open, he looks resigned.

“Did you make your choice?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Cool. Let’s get back to HQ. I have some questions for Patrick.”

We drive down the road in silence.

I don’t have to ask him who he chose. I knew from the moment I saw that Mustang roll into the parking lot with something other than an empty space on the passenger side.


	10. Chapter 9 - Brendon

For some sort of prestigious hunting legend, Sam Winchester seems like a pretty cool guy. He’s nice, but not in the sense that Patrick’s nice, all bright smiles and gentle mannerisms. It’s more a sense of steadiness and thoughtfulness with Sam, like he knows that he could kick your ass into the next dimension but chooses not to because it wouldn’t be very polite. We make small talk as I navigate the Mustang through lunch rush traffic, my grip on the steering wheel tight enough that my hands groan out their discomfort. On top of everything else that’s keeping me on edge, I don’t want to imagine what sort of horrible end I’ll meet if Ryan comes back to HQ to see a single scratch on his car.  
  
I didn’t sleep last night. As if I could have. I sat on the couch until three in the morning trying to quell the panic rising up in my chest, watching late-night TV and wondering when fatigue would get the best of me and finally calm the roaring inside my head. It never did. After the talk shows stopped and the hours of early-morning infomercials started, I gave up on the idea of my body doing me any favors, got up and walked to the guest room to see if Ryan would give me a couple of Ambien so I could knock myself out. My hand was hovering over the knob when I heard him snoring on the other side of the door and thought better of it. At least one of us deserved to rest. The idea of sitting in the living room alone with my thoughts made me spiral a little further into my impending freakout, so I opted to pace laps around the house for another hour, finally ending up in the kitchen with an elixir comprised of half a bottle of cheap convenience store vodka and a two liter of grape soda from the fridge. Apparently, I’d adopted Ryan’s coping mechanisms without being aware of it. He just shook his head silently when he walked into the kitchen for his coffee only to find me sitting on top of the counter giggling at nothing. Some part of me knows that he’ll bring it up sometime in the future - if I even have one - when he needs ammunition.  
  
“Uh, the light’s green,” Sam mutters, jerking me out of my thoughts. I swear and hit the gas, blowing through the intersection a little faster than I should. He looks at me with a slightly raised eyebrow, genuinely curious. “You okay?”  
  
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just…” I laugh in a way that only manages to sound slightly deranged, the product of sleep deprivation and ten million things battering the inside of my skull, trying to get out. “I’m a little stressed out.”  
  
Sam snorts quietly and leans back in his seat, hazel eyes looking out at the traffic without really seeing it. He has that same look of being older than his physical age as Ryan does, I notice. He’s handsome despite some pretty unfortunate wardrobe choices and a dire need of a haircut, but he looks tired. Permanently tired. “No one’s blaming you for that. I’ve dealt with an Apocalypse before. If it’s any consolation, you’re handling it pretty gracefully. I can’t imagine being a brand-new hunter and getting something like that thrown at me. It’s a wonder you haven’t torn your hair out yet.”  
  
“I’m getting there,” I sigh, turning up onto the ramp that will take us the short way to Pete and Patrick’s. Ryan left his iPod in the car, and RUSH’s  _2112_  provides the soundtrack for the drive, ‘Something For Nothing’ straining softly through the speakers. I mumble along with a verse absently as I merge onto the expressway, driving through a few minutes of lull in the conversation before I’m struck with a fresh thought. “Is that how you guys know Ryan? Did he help stop your Apocalypse?”  
  
He shakes his head. “Nah. We met Ryan way before the Apocalypse; worked a case down in Mobile with him and his girlfriend and his buddy Spencer. He did help us out of a few tight spots with the whole end of the world thing, though.”  
  
My stomach drops to my shoes. Mobile was where Ryan lost Z the first time. When I’d envisioned the situation, I’d always thought that they had been working alone. Something about the fact that there were other people there to watch him lose the one thing he had left makes something ache quietly at the very core of me. “So you were there when…”  
  
“Yeah. Dean and Spence had to drag him out of the building. It was… It was pretty rough. Did he tell you what happened?”  
  
I taste something sickly and metallic on the backs of my teeth, stomach churning like I’m about to throw up. Maybe the vodka-and-grape-soda concoction wasn’t such a great idea after all. “I sort of got to find out firsthand when we went to Summerdale last week. ‘Pretty rough’ is kind of an understatement.”  
  
Sam’s eyes widen. “Did he…”  
  
“Yeah. He’s not saying anything about it, but I think he’s been in a pretty bad place ever since.”  
  
The album stops playing, and there’s a long, oppressive quiet that follows. Growing up in house with seven kids, I was never used to silence. Even in the deepest parts of the night there was something to hear, the creak of the stairs as someone went for a midnight snack, the soft snoring of the brother on the other side of the wall, the rustle of the one you shared a room with rolling over in his sleep. As I got older and my brothers moved out one by one, I became familiar with quiet for the first time in my life. Even then, it didn’t sit too well with me. Everything seemed too empty without constant sound to fill the spaces of the house, the cavernous lack of life making me more uneasy than I was ever willing to admit. I lived with it. I slept with my stereo on and grew used to nights of nothingness. I coped.  
  
I seem to have lost that ability now. In the wake of everything that’s happened, quiet isn’t a mere absence of sound. It’s something malicious and hateful, an opportunity for the horror I’ve been trying to swallow for months to rise up and consume me. I tried to fight it, slept with the TV on at Pete and Patrick’s, filled the library with music during my hours of research, latched onto the slow rasp of Ryan’s breathing across the darkness of motel rooms, but it never stopped the feeling of being slowly suffocated by the pressure of my supposed fate. In the end, I always seem to slip a little bit further into this downward spiral I’ve been falling into since the day I watched a house that was wonderfully full for once in a long while become empty forever. Yesterday, my spiral became a screaming nosedive. The silence just makes the ground loom ever closer. My hands tighten on the steering wheel again. The ache of my protesting bones gives me something to focus on.  
  
“I thought something was up with him.” Sam finally speaks up, and I nearly jump out of my skin, jerking the wheel sharply to the left and almost steering us into oncoming traffic. As soon as I get us back in the right lane, he looks at me apologetically, raking a hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to say anything to him about it. He gets along better with Dean; I figured they’d sort it out. But  _that_  on top of a world-ending crisis, man. Poor guy.”  
  
The guilt hits me like a locomotive for the umpteenth time, splintering my ribcage and setting my lungs on fire. We’d had enough problems to deal with  _before_  I forced us into going to Summerdale, and now it’s a wonder that either of us is functioning. I was a wreck before. Now that Ryan’s one too, how are we going to keep ourselves upright long enough to fight off the impending doom of the world and everyone in it?  
  
“It was my fault we ended up there in the first place,” I whisper, barely audible over the hum of the engine. “Ryan probably wishes he’d never met me.”  
  
“If he didn’t want to help you, he’d be a thousand miles out of your life right now,” Sam says like it’s something irrefutable, a fact that I should know automatically.  
  
I laugh humorlessly, more of a sharp exhalation than anything else. “He owes me a debt. That’s the only reason he’s  _not_  a thousand miles out of my life right now.”  
  
“A debt?”  
  
“Yeah. I saved his life the day we met.” It feels like centuries ago. It’s been two weeks. How in the hell is that even possible? I was an entirely different person two weeks ago. Now I’m not sure what I am. Something a little less than human, a little more than a monster. Maybe this is what a Walking Apocalypse is supposed to feel like. “This… demon thing, it killed my entire family except for me. I went on the run for about a month, was hiding in the woods in Minnesota when Ryan found me. He was hunting a Wendigo, but I’d thought it was that  _thing_  and I was so tired of running by that point that I just went after it blindly. Some stuff happened, Ryan got in a tricky spot, and I fried the Wendigo. So after that, he said he owed me enough to help me get the thing that killed my family.”  
  
Sam purses his lips. “He found you in the middle of the woods?”  
  
“Yeah. I still don’t understand how it happened,” I reply, shaking my head and getting over for the exit to HQ. “Both of us alone in miles of wilderness, and we still managed to cross paths. The odds of that are ridiculous.”  
  
Another long stretch of quiet, this one filled with Sam looking at me like I’m some sort of puzzle, trying to cobble the pieces of me together until he can figure something out. He’s got his work cut out for him. After a minute he sighs and says, “Some people are just meant to find each other.”  
  
“Apparently. There’s some sort of prophecy about the end of the world and this thing… Atiria. She’s called Atiria.” I force myself to say the name and it makes my insides clench violently, my nails digging furrows into the leather covering the steering wheel. “There’s something special in my blood, and she wants to use it to destroy the gates of Hell. Patrick’s done some speculating, and I guess it all comes down to me and Ryan. We’re the ones that make or break it.”  
  
He blinks slowly. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
“I don’t need sympathy,” I say before I can stop myself, my tone short and clipped. Just days ago I’d gotten mad at Ryan for saying the same thing to me. What am I turning into?  
  
“I just...” Sam starts, looking more awkward than I feel, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. “Long story short, I know what it’s like. Having a force of evil after you, this huge destiny you want nothing to do with hanging over your head. It’s tiring and scary and it generally makes you feel like crap. I don’t know if Ryan’s ‘feelings are for wimps’ attitude has rubbed off on you yet, but I’m here if you want someone to talk to.”  
  
There it is;  _now_  I can see why Ryan gets along better with Dean. Sam actually has a range of emotion that extends beyond pissed-off and more-pissed-off, and it’s a relief I didn’t know I needed. Sighing, I take the exit to our right and grin wearily in his direction. “Yeah, I might take you up on that. Thanks.”  
  
“You’ll be okay. I don’t know how much comfort that is coming from me, but you’re in good hands,” he says with a soft smile as we turn onto Pete and Patrick’s street. “He’s not the best at dealing with emotional matters, but prophecy or not, you should trust Ryan. He won’t let anything touch you. He’s lost too many people he cares about to let it happen again.”  
  
I raise an eyebrow at him. “Ryan owes me. Owing someone and caring about them are two different things.”  
  
Sam just laughs.  
  
We pull into the garage, and I don’t say anything, watching him climb out of the car while I sit numbly in the driver’s seat, wondering what’s so funny about that.  
  


* * *

  
Pete practically attacks me the second I walk into the library, jumping to his feet with a sheaf of papers in hand and running over to me. “Where the hell  _were_  you guys?! I get out of my conference call and you’re just gone, how many times do I have to tell you -”  
  
“Uh, Pete?”  
  
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m yelling at you! I get that you and Ryan are trying to play nice or whatever, but you’re not in any kind of position to be running around all over the place when you might as well have nitroglycerin in your veins, Brendon! You can’t just  _disappear_  and not expect us to freak out, it’s not -”  
  
“Pete!” He actually stops talking long enough for me to get a word in edgewise, looking at me like he’s surprised that I raised my voice. Maybe I need to change the particular something within myself that makes people just assume that I’ll be passive enough to let them shout at me. Both Pete and Ryan seem to operate under that assumption, and it makes a palpable twitch of anger work its way up my spine. You’d think that if I’m carrying the fate of the world in my blood, that would be enough to earn me a little bit of respect. “First of all, you’re not my mother, and the next time you try to act like you are, I’ll punch you. Second of all, Ryan and I left this morning because we were  _working_  on the whole end of the world thing. You can worry about me living dangerously all you want, but I’m not going to sit here twiddling my thumbs while the evil bitch that killed my whole family is still running around out there. You don’t like it? Deal.”  
  
Patrick, who’s been sitting at his desk quietly up to this point, lowers his book slowly with a dumbfounded look. My jaw tenses. “What?! I’m not allowed to tell it like it is now?! Jesus, I’m not made of porcelain, guys! I don’t even have anything to lose anymore! My family’s gone, I can’t ever go home again; If I can’t at least fight for myself, what am I good for?!”  
  
“You done?” Patrick asks calmly.  
  
“No, I’m not fucking done!” Everything that’s been clamoring around inside me for so long has finally started to leak out, painting my lips with poison and honing every word to a razor’s edge. “The past month or so of my life has been pretty damn awful, but the last two weeks have been  _hell_. I can’t go two seconds without someone being up in my face for no good reason. If it’s not you or Pete nagging me, it’s Ryan being an asshole about something pointless, and on top of all that, I find out yesterday that the Empress of Evil wants to rip me to shreds and destroy the world with my blood, and it’s up to me to stop her! I’m a nervous wreck, I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do, and I’m terrified because, oh yeah, there’s something out there that wants to _kill me._  So now I have to deal with that and being treated like everyone’s little bitch? If you guys are going to ride my ass all the time, the  _least_  you could do is pull my hair.”  
  
Looking at me over the top of his glasses, Patrick sighs and adjusts his fedora. “I’m sorry you feel that way. But you have to know that we’re not hounding you pointlessly, Brendon. Anything we do, it’s because we care about you and -”  
  
 _“Stop it!”_  I shout, something cracking in my throat from the onslaught of the sound. I want to break something, hit something, but I feel paralyzed, rooted to the floor as the horrible truth flows out of me in a raspy tone a half octave above my normal speaking range. Every brutal, bloody consonant aches all the way down to my bones. “Stop with the bullshit, already! I’m not stupid! _Stop saying that people care!_  You don’t want the world going to shit, and I’m the independent variable in that equation. None of you care about me. You care about keeping Atiria from getting her hands on me. You, Pete,  _Ryan…_ ”  
  
That last name sears in my throat at the idea of applying those standards to him, but I force the syllables past my clenched teeth anyway. If there’s anything he’s taught me, it’s that being an optimist isn’t an option anymore. If I want to have a hope of survival, I need to see things the way they are. “That’s all any of you care about. And that’s fine. I understand. But  _don’t_  lie to me about it.”  
  
I’m so angry that it feels like something is eating away at me from the inside out. I’m empty, aching, and physically shaking by the time Sam edges awkwardly into the room, knocking softly on the doorframe. “Uh… hope I’m not interrupting anything.”  
  
“Not at all, Sam. Nice to see you,” Patrick says perfectly amiably, blinking up at him like I haven’t just been having a minor psychotic break in his study. “Good of you to come help out. It’s probably pretty obvious that we’ve got our hands full.”  
  
“Yeah, I gathered that much,” Sam mumbles, looking back and forth between me and Patrick with an expression that says he heard more of the conversation than he’s willing to admit. His eyes harden briefly when he turns his gaze to the other side of the room, though, his lips pressing into a thin line. “Pete.”  
  
“Sam,” Pete replies, nodding stiffly. “Heard your soul’s back in the right place. Congrats. How’s it feel to not be stuck in a permanent state of dirtball anymore?”  
  
“I’ve already apologized for Tallahassee, Pete.” I can’t tell whether Sam’s angry or just exasperated, but I have a distinct feeling that given his size versus Pete’s size, seeing him in any sort of irritated mood won’t be good for anyone involved.  
  
“I lost four good hunters that day. It’s a bit beyond apologies” he snaps, arms crossed and shoulders tense. “It’s nice how you get to write all that douchebaggery off and pretend it never happened.”  
  
“And it’s nice how you can put off all that blame while completely ignoring the fact that if you knew how to run a dispatch properly, you wouldn’t have lost anyone -”  
  
“All right, boys, zip up and put your rulers away,” Patrick says, rolling his eyes. “There’s work to do.”  
  
He hops up from behind his desk in a quick motion, leaving his book open in favor of picking up a thick, paper-stuffed folder as he rounds the corner. Whatever tension exists between Pete and Sam, Patrick’s decidedly not a part of it, handing Sam the folder with a weary smile and gesturing to the armchairs nearby. Sam’s brow furrows as he flips the folder open, scanning the first page. “Is this all of our intel?”  
  
“So far, yes,” Patrick nods, looking just a little excited to be in the presence of another genius, if I’ve heard Ryan tell it right. “Page one is your table of contents. After that I’ve got the original case file on Brendon that Ryan drew up a few weeks ago, my edited copy of said case file, and a detailed outline of my reasoning behind Atiria as our perpetrator, followed by all of my lore and sources in chronological order.”  
  
Sam blinks disbelievingly. “This might be the easiest research session I’ve ever done.”  
  
“We aim to please. There’s also tea, coffee, and snacks available if you’re interested,” says Patrick, grabbing his own folder off the desk before turning to look at me. “Um… Sam and I have some pretty heavy paperwork to wade through. Pete, do you want to take Brendon up to your office and discuss what you found out today with him?”  
  
“Sure, provided he doesn’t bite my head off in the process,” Pete grumbles, jerking his head in the direction of the door and stalking off without waiting to see if I’ll follow him. I strongly consider not doing it. In fact, I strongly consider running back out to the garage, hopping in the Mustang, and driving to the horizon until the gas tank runs out. The only thing that stops me is the terrifying thought that the raw force of Ryan’s anger if I did would probably produce enough energy for him to actually teleport to my location and eviscerate me with his bare hands.  
  
I sigh and head for the stairs. I’ll take Pete’s commonplace bitchiness over Ryan’s wrath any day.  
  
The last time I was in Pete’s office was the day that he sent Ryan and I after the twelve-year-old Werewolf. The memory makes me vaguely ill, so I decide to focus instead on the things that have changed about the space when I walk through the door. The names on his giant map have moved around, with Willam’s crew in Kansas, Andy and Joe on a poltergeist in Toledo, and Jon back home over the well-worn Chicago area on the laminated paper. But it’s my life that’s staring back at me from every other available space in the room, pictures on every corkboard and bare piece of wall. I stare into the faded, smiling faces of my parents, my brothers, my grandparents that were all dead before any of this came to pass. The breath is sucked from my lungs with an agonizing whoosh, my spine curling inward in a futile effort to help me hold myself together. Each one of those immortalized smiles feels like a silent accusation, a judgment passed that settles on me with a weight I can’t even begin to bear.  
  
“I don’t like your new interior design,” I croak, grabbing the edge of Pete’s desk to keep myself standing. I want to look away from those snatches of the life I used to have, but I can’t. And one by one, all those smiles turn to silenced screams, all those carefully coordinated outfits turn into torn, bloodstained ribbons, all those eyes the same shade as mine become empty and dead. I can feel the screams pressing at the underside of my vocal cords. I bite them back so hard that I taste blood. My mind whirls in an effort to find something to calm itself, giving me a few snatches of mercy, memories and sensations that lend me something other than horror. The hum of an engine. The heat that clings to a leather jacket when it’s been out in the sun. The smell of Marlboro Reds and Old Spice. After an eternity of trying, I manage to draw a full breath.  
  
“Fuck, I’m sorry. I didn’t think…” Pete trails off, yanking photos down at a rapid pace and stuffing them arbitrarily into his desk drawer as if the damage weren’t already done. Part of me wants to cry as I watch all my loved ones become wrinkled and creased as they’re stuffed into the dark recesses of the world that took them from me in the first place. I try to let myself, thinking that it might make me feel better. The tears won’t come. Have I lost my capacity for grief? No. I still feel it, corrosive and burning in the center of my chest. All I’ve lost is my capacity for showing it. Figures. You can only spend so much time in close proximity with Ryan Ross before your spectrum of human emotion starts eroding.  
  
“It’s fine,” I finally choke out, sinking into a chair and looking at my feet so I don’t have to see any of the rest of it. It’s fine because it  _has_  to be fine; what’s dead is dead and there are so many things to worry about without dwelling on the things I’ll never be able to get back. I’ve never had the time to mourn my family. I’ll probably never get the time to mourn them. In the beginning, I was too scared to grieve, too preoccupied with running. Now, I’m too angry, too vengeful to grieve. In the future, a month, a week, a day? I’ll probably be too dead to grieve. “What did you find?”  
  
Pete stashes the last of the pictures and flops into his chair, looking at me incredulously. “Well, I have some questions before we get into all of that, the first of which is where the  _hell_  is Ross?”  
  
I don’t have the energy to be confused. “He’s out with Dean. I dont know what they’re doing. Why?”  
  
The only reply I get is a miffed growl, Pete cursing under his breath and raking a hand through his hair. “Helpful. Okay, next inquiry down that path. Did you see Ryan with a gun at any point today?”  
  
My eyebrows knit together. “Ryan’s always got a gun.”  
  
“No, not  _his_  gun.” Oh, well thanks for clearing that up right from the get-go. “An old Colt revolver, lots of engravings on it. Did you see him with anything like that?”  
  
“I don’t make it my business what Ryan carries around in his pants, Pete,” I deadpan.  
  
“Don’t be glib, Brendon,” he snaps, slapping a hand down on the surface of his desk. “You’d be a lot less of a smartass about it if you were aware of the fact that the gun in question is probably your only shot - no pun intended - at taking Atiria out. And the fact that I have reason to believe Ryan stole said gun from me this morning.”  
  
 _“What?”_  
  
“Yeah, not so blasé now, are you?” Pete glowers at me, pointing at an old framed Pink Floyd poster on the far wall. “Ryan’s one of five people who know that my safe is back there, and one of three people who knew the gun was in there. One of those people is Patrick, who doesn’t have it, and the other one is Spencer Smith, who’s been MIA for God knows how long. He was in here this morning while I was on my conference call, and when I went into the safe later on to get something for Pat, the gun was gone.”  
  
“Yeah, but… what’s the big deal about it?” I ask, deciding not to acknowledge the extremely offended glare that Pete shoots me in response. “ I mean, I tried to use a gun on Atiria before. If you look at my case file, you’ll find that it didn’t go too well for me.”  
  
“It’s not an ordinary gun. This thing’s the great-grand-pappy of all hunter’s weapons.” I feel a story coming on, try to tell the raging headache that’s set up shop in my skull to save it for later. Pete perches his elbows on the desk and looks at me through steepled fingers, nodding at the poster covering his safe. “Way back in the day, there was this guy, a hunter and famous gunsmith named Samuel Colt. He invented the revolver. And, in this case, he invented a revolver that can kill pretty much anything, supernatural or otherwise.”  
  
“Pretty much anything?” I ask, my interest piqued.  
  
“Yeah, it doesn’t work on Satan, but that’s about it,” Pete says offhandedly. I laugh. He gives me a weird look. “No, seriously. Dean Winchester popped Lucifer in the head with it, and all it did was knock him out for a minute. At any rate, it’ll most likely kill Atiria stone dead if we can tackle the problem of finding her. And if Ryan didn’t do something stupid like give it back to Dean.”  
  
“Woah, wait, it’s Dean’s gun?” I ask, suddenly far more confused than I was five seconds ago.  
  
“It’s a gun that Dean happened to find in the right place at the right time,” Pete grumbles darkly, reaching over to flip his laptop open. “He  _lost it_  in the last Apocalypse and Spencer ended up digging it out of the wreckage of some back-ass town in Missouri. By that time, Dean was on a sabbatical, and Sam… well, Sam had a little dust-up that involved him losing his soul. He's gotten it back since, but at the time he wasn’t fit to be carrying a weapon with that kind of power around. We’ll leave it at that. By all rights, one of my guys brought it to me; the gun’s in my custody. Or was.”  
  
Wrapping my arms around my torso, I draw my legs up to my chest, perching my chin on my knees and staring at Pete. “Why would Ryan want to steal it?”  
  
“Because Ryan Ross has a very strict, very stupidly noble, slightly warped personal moral code, and he isn’t afraid of being an underhanded bastard in order to enforce it.” The more he talks about it, the more angry Pete looks, shifting from snippy moodiness into the beginnings of an all-out rage. “We need that gun. Especially given the information I found out about you today.”  
  
“Which is?” I ask apprehensively.  
  
Pete shifts a bit uncomfortably in his chair, scratching at the back of his head before speaking in a voice that’s markedly calmer than before. He’s trying to keep me steady. That fact immediately makes me feel ten times more unsteady than I already did. “I finally dug back far enough in your family tree to figure out just who you are - hence all the photos. I’ve been doing some hardcorde genaealogy homework that didn’t pan out until this afternoon, and I don’t want to freak you out, but… that prophecy’s a hundred percent true, Brendon. And it’s definitely about you. You’ve got something in your blood with the potential to burn down the whole goddamn world.”  
  
The universe collapses around me. All this time, I’d been holding onto the stupid, fragile hope that maybe Ryan’s opinion that prophecies were nothing but smoke and mirrors was true, that the entirety of mankind’s fate wasn’t actually in my hands. Now, all of that small comfort falls to pieces right in front of me, collapsing into dangerous shards at my feet and exposing the terrifying reality - I am dealing with something so much bigger than myself that I can’t even fathom it, and I’m somehow charged with shutting it down. What could possibly be in my blood that’s so dangerous? I’d thought Ryan was right when he said that I was just a skinny white boy from Vegas who’d never done anything out of the ordinary. What if he was wrong? Within my veins sits some sort of paranormal explosive, something with the power to ruin all of creation, and I don’t even know  _why._  It takes a while for me to realize that I’ve started hyperventilating, curled into a ball in my chair and trembling like a lost child. I try for words, but it takes all the effort of moving a mountain for even three simple ones. “What is it?”  
  
“Brendon, don’t -”  
  
 _“What am I?”_  I wheeze, icy panic flooding my lungs and spreading down to the substructure of every cell. Those words are what finally make it real, the realization that I’m not normal. I’ve never been normal. In fact, I’m something utterly terrifying. I am a Walking Apocalypse. When I told my parents that I wanted to do something big with my life, I’d never had anything on this level in mind.  
  
“It’s not a  _what,_ ” Pete explains, twisting his laptop around to show a long, complicated diagram on the screen. “It’s a  _who._  Look in that third column, several generations back.”  
  
Trying to force myself to take deep breaths and calm down enough to at least somewhat function, I lean forward and start reading through names and dates, combing back centuries until I hit… “Wait, isn’t that the gun guy?”  
  
“Yeah, Samuel Colt. That’s where your mojo is from,” Pete nods, tapping the spot on the screen where the name sits, seemingly innocently. “No wonder Ryan said you had the gut for hunting. The greatest of them all is your several-greats grandpa. In fact, your paternal grandmother is a direct descendant. But see, the thing about Samuel Colt is that he didn’t just make that gun, Brendon. He’s also known for building a Devil’s Gate. Pretty obvious name, but it’s essentially -”  
  
“A gate to Hell,” I whisper, planting my head in my hands. “Oh my God.”  
  
“Yeah. Now, the exact architecture for building these things is way under wraps, but from what Patrick can tell, it involves a pretty hefty amount of blood magic to seal it - sigils, sacrifice, what have you.” If Pete notices me falling apart just across the desk from him, he says nothing about it, prattling on like this is just another lesson. “Blood magic is the most powerful, permanent stuff there is. What’s done by blood can only be undone by blood. And you’re not only Colt’s descendant, you’re a seventh son of a seventh son in his direct bloodline. With blood like yours, you won’t just open that gate if Atiria manages to get her hands on you. You’ll blow it into oblivion.”  
  
I feel like there’s been an anvil dropped on my head. Something puts lead in my veins and renders me powerless in my own body, curled numbly in my chair and trembling to the point that I can actually see the rapid back-and-forth of my hands. I clench them into fists to stop it. It doesn’t work. There’s something here that doesn't quite fit, one last glimmer of hope that this is all wrong, that I’m not this fated tragedy doomed to befall the world. “But if all she needs to destroy the gate is my blood, why didn’t she just kill me when I was a baby? Why wait until I’m twenty-one and capable of running? It seems like too big of a deal to make a game out of it.”  
  
“We’ve considered that. As far as I can tell, there’s some sort of ritual that she has to do at a certain time. Something that will start a domino effect, destroy Colt’s gate and then take all the others with it, blow up every entrance to Hell in existence. And then, well…”  
  
“Then all hell breaks loose,” I say hollowly.  
  
“Yup,” Pete nods. “Literally. Are, uh… Are you okay? Are you processing this?”  
  
“Sure. We have to stop the actual embodiment of Evil before she can ritualistically drain all my blood out, use it to bust open the Netherworld, and unleash legions of demons and who knows what else on the the world until nothing but a smoldering heap remains.” For the simple, shallow way I say it, I could be reciting my multiplication tables, repeating history dates. Six times five is thirty, in fourteen-hundred-ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and there’s nothing but skin, space, and Ryan’s role in the prophecy to stop the world from going up in flames, because God knows I won’t be able to do anything. Funny, how I was defending my right to fight for myself so valiantly just minutes ago, and now the truth has finally hit home.  
  
I can’t save the world. I couldn’t even save my own family. At the end of the day, I probably won’t be capable of saving myself.  
  
“Actually,” I mumble, a chill spreading under my skin. “I’m not feeling so hot. Mind if I skip whatever you guys are doing with Sam? I just… I need to take a step back from this whole thing for a little bit, get my head in the right place.”  
  
“Understandable,” Pete shrugs, hopping up from his chair and clapping me on the back on his way out of the office. “All things considered, you’ve been a real trooper, kiddo. Go rest. You deserve it. We’ll take care of the logistics.”  
  
He leaves the room after that, disappearing down the hallway as I sit and stare blankly ahead. I wait until I hear his feet on the stairs before I get up, feeling somehow disconnected from my body. It’s like there’s some outside force moving my limbs, piloting me slowly out of the office and back the hallway. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. My mind doesn’t want to deal with anything I’ve just found out, and yet it won’t let go of the slowly growing horror that’s begun to simmer in my stomach. It expands outwards as I shuffle over the carpet, spreading up to constrict around my throat and choke off my breath. By the time I make it into the safe haven of the bathroom, there are bright lights of oxygen deprivation flashing in front of my eyes. I stumble over to grip the edge of the sink, looking at the person in the mirror and not recognizing him at all.  
  
It’s not Brendon looking back at me. This other person, he’s nothing but a time-bomb who’s just now realized what he is, a hollowness in his eyes that makes them into empty pits, spiralling downwards into nothingness. I’m not  _me_  anymore. I think I always knew that the essence of me died back in Vegas with the rest of my family, but now the reality of it slams into me with unrelenting force, tearing me apart at the seams. This terrified, lost-looking thing staring at me from the reflective surface is a wreck. He’s not a prophesied hero. He’s not even a functional human being.  
  
If the world’s last hope is riding on me, we’re all fucked.  
  
My stomach churns violently, and I gag, hunching over the sink. But for whatever reason, I don’t get sick. Maybe it’s just that numbness that’s been growing in me in the wake of everything I’ve seen, or maybe it’s just a lack of food in my stomach, but for whatever reason, my body refuses to reject any of this, holding it close and turning it inwards until my head is nothing but a muddle of frantic thoughts and unshed screams. And then through it all, there’s a thin ribbon of calm, a serene little voice that tells me what I’ve been refusing to acknowledge. I’ve had the answer to this problem ever since I found out what it was.  
  
There’s a knife in my back pocket that Ryan gave me a few days ago. The steps are simple. Climb in the bathtub, sever my femoral artery, and let it all go from there. All that sacred blood down the drain, lost to Chicago’s sewer systems and out of Atiria’s reach forever.  
  
I pull the knife out and hold it in my outstretched palm, staring at the folded blade for what feels like an eternity. My own heartbeat sounds like cannon-fire in my ears, louder with every second until it consumes me.  
  
Exhaling shakily, I put the knife back in my pocket. If I die, Atiria still gets some form of victory. It’s not cowardice that stops me from killing myself. It’s stubbornness. There’s nothing left to keep me moving forward besides the desire to watch her  _burn_. I can’t do that if I’m dead.  
  
The lights in the bathroom suddenly seem too bright. I squint and force myself to stand upright again, walking across the hall and into the guest room. The door clicks shut behind me, sounds much louder than it should. I can hear Pete, Patrick, and Sam having a conversation in the library beneath me, their vague, muffled voices floating upwards through the floor. They’re not paying enough attention to hear me.  
  
For what feels like the millionth time, there’s no one here. No one cares. That’s enough knowledge to finally cut whatever strings are holding me up. With a faint ghost of an almost-sob, I collapse on Ryan’s unmade bed and let myself fall apart.  
  
It’s a quiet sort of decimation. Anyone who could walk in the room right now would just see me lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, breathing slowly in and out. But inside, I’m a hurricane. Every cell of me is imploding, falling inwards into an endless void of panic that tugs insistently at me, calling me down. I can’t do this. I was a complete idiot to ever even begin to think that I could do this.  
  
That’s the hateful part of it. Since the beginning, I’ve been determined to fight. But how am I supposed to do that now? Any act of me sticking my neck out will only mean Atiria grabbing it and tearing it wide open. The prophecy said that I have the ability to save the world, but how? How am I supposed to save the world when any action I take could result in the end of everything as we know it? I’ve spent so long looking for options only to realize that I never had any to begin with. My hands are tied, and I’m completely helpless. At this point, it’s just a waiting game.  
  
But if that’s the case, what good is the prophecy in the first place? If my fate’s been predestined this whole time, then the only purpose that stupid hunk of rock serves is to dose me up with false hope and then tear it all away. All it’s done is inform me that I’m prolonging the inevitable. My burden to bear is the weight of a world that’s already doomed. It’s too much to carry alone. But I’m not going to be alone, right? If the prophecy is true, there’s another person out there whose fate is tangled with my own. I think of Sam’s cryptic  _Some people are just meant to find each other,_  of the smell of pine trees and a campfire’s glow, and it’s finally possible for me to find a little bit of peace.  
  
That is, it’s possible until I’m hit with the full extent of exactly what that means. The world burning to the ground because of me is something so big that I can’t wrap my head around it, some sort of vague threat hanging over my head. But the idea of dragging Ryan down with me is something far more personal, far more intimate, and it shoves an icy knife straight between my ribs. Stupid hunk of rock or not, the prophecy does hold truth in it. And if I believe those truths, I’m faced with something so horrible that it makes the hurricane in my mind explode into an all-out tsunami.  
  
If I don’t fight this battle, I’m dead, and Ryan dies with me. If I do fight it, the most likely outcome is that I’m dead, and Ryan dies with me. A weird, croaking gasp rattles around in my throat, fists clenching the rumpled sheets as I curl into a ball and try to remind myself to keep breathing.  
  
I’ve never had a choice. I can’t do this. There’s absolutely nothing about me that qualifies me to tangle with Evil itself. By all stretches of the imagination, going against Atiria and winning is almost impossible. But that stupid rock says that there’s a chance of it happening. A chance. Fighting a battle with paper-thin odds of winning is better than accepting defeat, especially when the whole world is on the line. I can’t do this, but Fate requires me to try anyway. That’s the most sick, sadistic twist of irony I’ve ever heard.  
  
Oddly enough, realizing the probability of my impending death has made me incredibly self-aware. I can feel my restlessness vibrating in my bones, feel my lungs pressing outwards against my ribs before caving in with every exhalation. I can feel my damned sacred blood that started this whole mess scraping along the linings of my veins in time with my pulse. Each little tick of the silver-blue lines beneath my skin is one more number off a countdown. How many more heartbeats do I have left? I wonder if it will hurt when Atiria kills me. Or maybe I’ll do the right thing when I realize our last hope is gone and find the guts to eat a bullet. And Ryan? I can’t be sure of what his part in this is, other than the fact that our fates are supposedly one. However he goes, I hope it’s quick. He deserves that much.  
  
He deserves more than that. He deserves the life with Z that he lost, a stable relationship and a home and a family. He deserves to smile once in a while. He deserves to die an old man, cranky and bitching at his grandkids about how things were different back in his day. He deserves so much more than dying young and bloody because he ran into a kid from Vegas in the Minnesota woods, ripped apart by a force of evil that would have never crossed his path if he hadn’t crossed mine first.  
  
And he  _will_  get ripped apart. Atiria made me watch my whole family die. If her previous method is any indicator, neither of us will go quickly.  
  
The mental image that the thought gives me is so repulsive that I physically convulse, unable to cope with the untamed madness running rampant in my head anymore. I have to shut it off, or I’ll lose what’s left of my fragile sanity. With shaking hands and uneven breaths, I force myself to crawl up to the top of the bed, snatch the little orange bottle off of Ryan’s bedside table. It rattles hollowly as I dump what’s left of it out in my palm - I can’t think coherently enough to count the pills, but it’s a handful. That should make my brain shut up - and knock them all back in one go, sputtering around a mouthful of flat Pepsi from the open bottle sitting next to the ashtray. Several minutes pass, but when the pills hit my stomach, they hit it hard, mixing with whatever’s left of the vodka that’s still in there and sending the room spinning precariously around me. I fall asleep to fragmented thoughts and the smell of cigarettes clinging to the sheets.  
  


* * *

  
My dreams are vivid and terrifying.  
  
It starts with blood. Blood everywhere. Rivers of it, swirling warm and viscous around my knees, crashing in waves around me. There’s no landscape, no setting. Just the blood. And then the bodies come, floating past in some sort of macabre parade of the people I’ve lost and the people I might lose. Pete and Patrick’s faces mingle with those of my brothers and my parents, empty eyes looking at me accusingly as they’re drowned by the crimson tides. I think I see Sam and Dean in there somewhere too, but I don’t leave myself time to think about it, turning away from the grisly scene with a ragged gasp and trying to wade my way out of the scarlet flow that’s risen up to my hips in the space of a few moments. It splashes everywhere in my struggle, staining my lips with sticky copper and stinging my eyes. The terrifying thought strikes me that I’m going to drown in it.  
  
And then just as suddenly as the river rose, it recedes, leaving me standing in congealing puddles, stumbling blindly away from the carnage. Everything from the ground beneath my feet to the nonexistent horizon is a blank canvas, empty space that doesn’t fit any sort of logical explanation. There’s nowhere for me to go, but I run anyway, only making it a few steps away from the carnage before my feet collide with something solid. I don’t want to look down. I shouldn’t look down. I look down.  
  
Ryan’s body is a ruin, a mess of grisly wounds that still bleed freely, spreading into a puddle of red around him. The scream gets trapped somewhere behind my clenched teeth, bouncing around in my throat until I feel like I’m suffocating. The unmarred parts of his skin are pale, a startling contrast with all the vermillion liquid surrounding him, eyes empty amber disks staring sightlessly overhead. He’s unquestionably dead.  
  
The surface of all that blood is oddly reflective. I can see myself perfectly in it, like some sort of ruby-tinted mirror, my reflection settled comfortably into the curve of Ryan’s lifeless arm. As I stare into my own terrified eyes, I see them flash a bright, poisonous green. And finally, mercifully, my body decides to let me scream.  
  
Ryan’s eyes are still lifeless, his body still a mutilated wreck, but that doesn’t stop his lips from moving, the hollow syllable echoing through the shattered remnants of my mind.  
  
“Bren!”  
  


* * *

  
“Bren, goddammit, wake up!” Spindly fingers dig into my shoulders, shaking me roughly. It takes a Herculean effort to drag my eyelids open, met with the blurry sight of Ryan looming over me, intact, alive, and very noticeably freaked out as he continues to jostle me back and forth. “Wake up! I didn’t bust my ass keepin’ you alive for this to happen, kid, don’t you  _dare!_ ”  
  
I groan incoherently, trying to make sense of my surroundings. There are blankets tangled around my legs and sunlight streaming through a window somewhere, but that’s about all I can fathom. There’s a hazy quality about everything, and I can’t form thoughts that are more than a second long.  
  
“How many did you take?” Ryan says hurriedly, abandoning shaking me like a rag doll in favor of cupping my face in his hands, turning my bleary eyes towards him. I mumble something nonsensical and try to roll away, thinking sluggishly that I’m not ready for the real world yet. He won’t let me move, holding me there in a surprisingly strong grip, his eyes wide and scared. “Brendon, how many fuckin’ pills did you take?!  _Tell me!_ ”  
  
“I… the bottle.” Words are a struggle that I can’t overcome, some wall in my head stopping my thoughts from articulating correctly. “Not much left. Five? Six, maybe?”  
  
Ryan pauses for a second, apparently going through some quick mental math before dropping me back onto the pillow with a vicious glare and a hiss working its way through teeth bared in a snarl. “You  _stupid_  son of a bitch. You’re never s’posed to take that many at once. It’s hard to OD on Ambien, but not when you couple that with the fact that you were drunker’n a sailor on shore leave a few hours ago. Jesus Tap Dancin’ Christ, Bren, don’t you know what mixin’ that stuff with alcohol can do to you?!”  
  
“Wanted to sleep,” I reply, confused as to why he’s so upset.  
  
“So ask Patrick for a bedtime story and drink some chamomile tea like a normal human being, for God’s sakes! Don’t down a bottle of vodka with a sleepin’ pill chaser! Are you touched in the head?!” Running a hand through his hair and muttering under his breath, Ryan stalks away from me, stopping at the end of the bed and turning around with an expression that’s still half-terrified. “Me and Dean pull in, Pete brings us up to speed and asks me to come check on you. I come up here and find you sprawled out in my bed with an empty pill bottle next to you, not movin’, don’t even look like you’re breathin’... I thought you were dead!”  
  
I try to laugh, but it comes out as more of a sleepy gurgle, the room spinning sickeningly. “Be easier if I… if I was.”  
  
Ryan’s back beside me in the time it takes for me to blink, a fist bunched up in the front of my shirt as he yanks me sharply towards him. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you  _ever_  say that.”  
  
There’s a weird sort of conviction in his voice that I can’t place, too disoriented to put my finger on the exact emotion. I must still have too much of the drug in me to have any sort of coherency, woken up before the Ambien could work its way out of my system. Or kill me, if Ryan’s telling it right. My vision is still unsteady, and sound has a weird, echoing quality to it, like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. I can see a visible spectrum of color in the rays of sunshine slanting through the window, and it’s fascinatingly pretty. I watch it for a few minutes, transfixed, until Ryan eventually lets go of my shirt and sits down on the edge of the bed with a sigh, his hand coming up to rest on my shoulder.  
  
“What were you thinkin’, Brendon?” he says.  
  
“Too much,” I say. Ryan looks hurt all the way down to the center of himself. I instantly regret opening my mouth, but now I don’t seem to be able to shut it. “My blood’s magic. Can’t fight her because she’ll get it, but I have to fight her anyway? We’re fucked, Ry. We’re so fucked.”  
  
“Hey. This ain’t the time to throw yourself a pity party,” Ryan counters, trying to sound gruff but coming off softer than he probably means to. His hand is warm to the point that I can feel it radiating through the fabric of my shirt, spreading out across my skin. Without thinking, I flop one of my hands up to clumsily rest over it, tracing the scars and calluses with curious fingertips. It feels safe. “We’ve got a plan to take her down. This ritual she needs to do? It’s soon. Sam and Patrick found some weird astronomy stuff about planets linin’ up here in the next few months, and we’re pretty sure that’s her window of opportunity. Dean’s got a gun that can kill pretty much anything you point it at, so we’re gonna take that and pull a classic bear trap move, okay? We take you out to Samuel Colt’s gate in Wyoming, destroy your hex bag, and wait for that bitch to show up.”  
  
“What happens when she does? End of the world?”  
  
“No,” he shakes his head, a familiar smirk painting his lips as he reaches up with his other hand to brush a piece of sweat-matted hair back from my forehead. “I put a bullet in her skull. That’s what happens.”  
  
When I try to laugh this time, it comes out sounding a little better. “I tried that once. Didn’t work.”  
  
“I’m a good shot.”  
  
“Yeah, you are,” I murmur sleepily. “Can’t wait to see it.”  
  
“So don’t take any more stupid drug cocktails.” There’s a pained sort of look on Ryan’s face, but he erases it quickly, filing the hurt away somewhere within himself until he just looks tired. “I mean it. Don’t do that again, Brendon. You scared the ever-livin’ shit outta me.”  
  
A funny warmth settles in my chest. I don’t know where it came from, don’t have the energy to examine it, but I like it. It blazes like a miniature sun, lights me up from the inside out and sears away a little bit of the haze clinging to my mind. I want to curl up around that warmth and keep it close to me, find a way to pull it out from between my ribs and put it in my pocket to keep for when the darkness closes in. From personal experience, I can count maybe three things in the world that scare Ryan. Four, if me dying is the newest addition to the list. It’s probably morbid as hell that it makes me feel better, knowing that the idea of my loss is enough to put fear in someone’s heart. Welcome to the psychology of a paranormal hunter with a heaping pile of post-traumatic stress and the fate of the world in his hands.  
  
Slowly, I manage a smile. “Careful, Ross. People will start saying you’re going soft.”  
  
“Let ‘em,” Ryan shrugs, giving my hand a quick squeeze and grinning roguishly. “It’ll make it more fun when I kick their ass.”  
  
I snort and burrow my way further into the mattress. “I’m sorry for scaring you. Thanks for taking care of me.”  
  
“Doin’ my job, kid.”  
  
“Since when am I your job?”  
  
“Since the day I met your sorry ass.” He rolls his eyes and stands up, grabbing his cigarettes and the empty Ambien bottle off the bedside table. I feel the absence of warmth immediately. The room starts to spin again, my drug-addled head set adrift with the loss of an anchor. “You need to sleep that shit off before you’re fit for duty. Take the night off, and we’ll talk about Wyoming tomorrow. I’ll be crashin’ on the couch if you need me.”  
  
"Stay," I say.  
  
"You're high," he says.  
  
"I am," I nod groggily, shuffling over to make space next to me. "But I don't want to be alone. Stay."  
  
A long period of quiet, a tentative warmth beside me. "Okay."  
  
His jacket flies across the room and lands on the dresser with a muffled thump, followed by the impact of his shoes hitting the floor before he carefully reaches down and untangles the covers from my legs, pulling them back into some semblance of order and folding his lanky frame into the space on the mattress I just vacated. The drugged-out haze in my head has shot my inhibitions to hell. I’m typically a pretty affectionate person, but even under normal standards I wouldn’t cling to a person as effortlessly as I do now, throwing an arm sleepily around Ryan’s whippet-thin waist and wiggling my head into the space between his neck and shoulder. For someone so bony, he’s a pretty comfortable pillow, his ribcage rising and falling slowly beneath my head. Yeah, I can live with this. Ryan acts as stilted and awkward as he always does when it comes to human contact, arms settling uncertainly around me as I curl into him. “You’re awful… cuddly.”  
  
“It’s because I’m sleepy, high, and emotionally compromised,” I say, yawning widely.  
  
Ryan scowls. “Stop it.”  
  
“Stop what?”  
  
“Your groggy, doe-eyed, yawnin’ bullshit,” he grumbles, reaching over to turn off the lamp. “I don’t like cute things. They make me feel like I need to turn in my Man Card after bein’ in close proximity to ‘em.”  
  
If I weren’t losing consciousness, I’d cackle. “You are  _so_  obviously compensating for something. But hey, thanks for calling me cute.”  
  
“Go to sleep, you dingus.”  
  
I'll regret this when my mind clears. I know I will. I’ll regret opening myself up to something I’ve been subconsciously fighting off for days, ever since that night in Nashville when I’d held him through the worst of his night terrors and watched him fall asleep curled into my side like something far more lost and broken than he’d ever seemed when he was awake. I’ll regret this as soon as the pills wear off, but for now there's a strong, steady beat keeping time in his chest, humming beneath my ear. It erases that silence I’ve always hated so much, and I find peace in it. Soon enough, I start to fall asleep again.  
  
"She's not gonna hurt you," I hear him say just before I slip back into the sea of blackness tugging at the edges of my mind, fingers carding absently through my hair. "I won't let her."  
  
I don't know if I stay awake long enough to actually say it, but I can feel the words hanging on my tongue. “I know you won’t.”  
  
Sam said that I should trust Ryan, but in that pivotal moment between sleep and wakefulness, I come to the realization that I already do. In the face of everything in my life changing, that’s the one thing that hasn’t.


	11. Chapter 10 - Ryan

 

 

I’m woken up much earlier than I’d prefer to be, and that’s what I get for going to bed unmedicated. After the scare back in Chicago, I left all of my Ambien in Pete and Patrick’s medicine cabinet before we hit the road. Despite Brendon swearing up and down that he’d never do something that stupid again, I wasn’t willing to risk it.  
  
We drove out I-80 with Sam and Dean’s rear bumper in front of us for most of yesterday, leaving HQ in our rearview with a sort of cautious optimism and hurried goodbyes. I don’t know what happened between Brendon, Pete, and Patrick while Dean and I were out, but it must have involved an argument. Brendon, who’s typically a sweetheart to anyone who isn’t named Ryan Ross, was pretty short with them, getting in the passenger side of the Mustang with nothing but a thinly veiled glare and a clipped “Yeah, bye.”  
  
He was quiet most of the ride, and that was fine with me. I had my own thoughts to get lost in, and that silence lasted us all the way to Omaha, where we settled down for the night and got a motel that sold us a room that connected to Dean and Sam’s through a creaky door across from the bathroom. It gets kind of fuzzy after that. I know Dean ran to the liquor store down the street and that at least part of the evening was spent with all of us watching the Cowboys game and drinking Jaagerbombs, but my groggy memory fades out somewhere between me grabbing twenty bucks from Sam after the game (“Don’t ever bet against my boys, Winchester, cough up.”) and trying to get Brendon, who proved to be much more of a lightweight than he wanted us to think, back into our room without injuring one or both of us.  
  
The sun is slanting through the moth-eaten curtains. I can feel it even though my eyes are still closed. My head is roaring. Today is going to suck. The noise that woke me up is coming from the other side of the thin wall, Dean banging around inconsiderately and blaring the TV like he  _knows_  I’m asleep and working my way up to one hell of a hangover. Bastard. The smell of coffee brewing wafts under the door between our rooms, and it only serves to drag my unwilling brain a little closer to consciousness. I groan into my pillow and roll over, throwing my arm across the bundle of warmth curled into my side.  
  
It’s unexpected, but I’m still too sleepy to properly freak out about it. I do finally crack an eye open, though, squinting against the light filtering through the curtains and watching Brendon burrow down a bit further into the covers. I think briefly about how this is the sight I saw yesterday morning, too, how I’d laid awake next to him in the guest bed all night, irrationally afraid that he’d stop breathing if I let my guard down for a second. He didn’t, though. He slept, deeply and soundly, letting the pills work their way out of his system until his eyes had opened just after sunrise, a sleepy smile tugging at his lips. There’s a ghost of that smile there now, lingering in the corners of his mouth. His eyelashes catch a little bit of the sunlight as they flutter against his cheekbones, and he’s still so deep in REM sleep that I can see the slight skittering motion beneath his eyelids. He’s so far into the hold of his dreams that this world doesn’t even exist. And for once, I don’t think the poor kid’s having any nightmares. His face is relaxed, full lips slightly parted, slow, even breaths washing rhythmic splashes of heat across my shoulder.  
  
Back in Nashville, I’d thought to myself that Brendon might be beautiful if I could see him in a certain light. Now, there’s no question to it. It’s as much of a fact as the sun rising just outside our window, and that reality scares me more than any monster ever could. Before I can stop myself, I’m reaching forward to fix that one lock of hair that’s always falling in his face. He leans into the touch with a mumble, trapping my hand beneath his cheek. Something hot and uncomfortable swells in my chest. I stomp it down with all the strength I have left in me.  
  
So he’s beautiful. There are plenty of beautiful people. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.  
  
“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauties!” Dean calls, kicking the door open with two cups of coffee in hand. “We need to be on the road in an hour if we want to make that appointment you set up with your contact in Cheyenne, Ross, so get your lazy ass out of… oh.”  
  
His eyes widen when he sees us, his voice trailing off into a somewhat stunned silence. Brendon sighs and rolls over, freeing my trapped hand, but he doesn’t open his eyes. This must look awful. I scramble for an explanation all while trying not to wake Brendon up, my voice cracking around a sleep-soaked whisper. “He, uh… I think he crawled in with me sometime last night. I’m as surprised as you are.”  
  
Dean smirks and nods over at the other bed. Still made. Fuck  _me._  “Uh-huh.”  
  
Oh, Holy Mother. We were both more drunk than we should have been last night, but there’s no way I could have been intoxicated enough to do something  _that_  stupid. Slightly horrified, I peek under the blankets, sighing in relief when I see that we’re both still wearing our jeans and the shirts we had on yesterday. I must have been trying to get him to bed and ended up passing out myself. Embarrassing, sure, but not catastrophic. I grumble and force myself to roll out of bed, the cold of the world outside the nest of blankets and body heat smacking into me like a brick wall. And yeah,  _there’s_  the hangover, injecting lead into my veins, making everything suddenly too loud and too bright. Dean looks like he’s making every effort not to burst out laughing. I flip him off and shuffle across the room, digging a bottle of Advil out of my duffel bag before walking back over to him.  
  
“Gimme,” I mumble, snatching one of the coffee cups from his hand and downing two capsules. It’s shitty motel coffee that tastes vaguely of charcoal, but it’s hot enough that it scorches my tastebuds and becomes bearable after a sip or two. I’m slightly coherent after half the cup, frowning in Dean’s direction and sitting down on the unmade bed. “How are you even up and movin’ right now?”  
  
“Because everyone but you was smart enough to drink a couple bottles of water before they turned in last night,” Dean counters with a roll of his eyes, setting the second cup of coffee down on the bedside table before looking down at Brendon, who’s still out. “Heavy sleeper, isn’t he?”  
  
“It’s ‘cause he almost never sleeps. Kid stays up all hours, keeps goin’ until his body gives out on him.” The headache prickles uncomfortably across the nape of my neck, and I find myself praying that the Advil will do its job, because there’s no way I can drive like this. Dean keeps looking at me like there’s something he wants to say, and I know what it is, so I shut him down before he can even start. “I’ll go get ready and let him sleep a bit more, and then I’ll get him up and we can hit the road. If we push the speed limit, we shouldn’t even have to leave until ten.”  
  
“And that meeting?”  
  
“Still happenin’, far as I know,” I shrug, picking up my phone from the dresser and checking my texts. “Yup, Sierra just sent me a confirmation an hour ago. She and Blake’ll be there.”  
  
“I’m not sure about this, Ryan,” he grumbles, hands in his pockets. “I don’t know this chick, and we’re bringing her in on the End of Days?”  
  
“But I know her. She and her partner worked a couple cases with me and Z back in the day. Sierra’s a good hunter, and more importantly, she knows the turf. We need her help on this.” He doesn’t argue any further, which means that I’ve made a valid point. I finish my coffee while Dean mumbles something about drive times and shuffles back out of the room, sparing one last awkward look at the dent in the blankets next to Brendon that’s shaped like me. I sigh and take another Advil. God knows I’ll need it.  
  
I can’t tell if it’s the ibuprofen finally hitting my bloodstream or just some truth behind the old wive’s tale that a shower helps with a hangover, but by the time I walk back into the room tugging on a clean pair of boxers and towelling off my hair, I feel exponentially better. Still not a hundred percent, but I’ll at least be able to drive without slamming us into a guardrail between here and Wyoming. Brendon’s still asleep as I pack up our stuff and pull a change of clothes out of my bag, soft snores getting muffled in the lumpy pillows. From where I’m standing, the only part of him I can see is a tuft of blackish hair sticking out of the blankets, the garish pattern of the worn fabric rising and falling slowly as he breathes. If I had my way, I’d let him sleep as long as he wanted. But as it stands, I’ve got a very grumpy Dean Winchester riding my ass, and I’m not in the mood to listen to him bitch for the rest of the day. I sigh and toss my clothes on the dresser, perching on the edge of the bed and placing a hand on Brendon’s shoulder. “Hey, Bren.”  
  
He mutters something and turns away almost petulantly, pulling a pillow over his head. I decide that I’ve been gentle enough and stand up with a frown, yanking the covers off him in one fell swoop and reaching over to flick on the light switch even though my head screams in protest. “Up and at ‘em, Urie. We’re hittin’ the road in half an hour. Dean brought coffee. Drink it and go get ready.”  
  
“Mmmwha?” Brendon groans, sitting up with bleary eyes squinted against the light. His hair is sticking up at a thousand different angles. I refuse to think it’s cute. “What time’s it?”  
  
“It’s about half past eight. Go shower, Brendon. I already laid you out some clothes and packed the rest of your shit, but I draw the line at washin’ your hair for you,” I snap, walking over to the dresser and pulling on my jeans and undershirt. When I turn back around, he’s out of bed and walking slowly back towards the bathroom, nursing his coffee. By the time I’ve shrugged on an old blue and green plaid flannel shirt and finished lacing up my boots, I can hear the high-pitched squeak of the shower running.  
  
I shoot off a text to Sierra, letting her know that we’re on our way before flopping back on the bed and staring at the ceiling, listening to Brendon humming some old Sinatra song on the other side of the bathroom door. I forgot to brush my teeth. Dammit.  
  
Grumbling, I hop up and walk into the back corner of the room, knocking arbitrarily before swinging the door open. A cloud of steam that could parboil an elephant rolls out into the room - Christ, does the kid try to scald his own skin off when he showers? - dampening the front of my shirt as I stick my head into the outdated bathroom. “Forgot my toothbrush.”  
  
“Oh, okay,” he replies from the other side of the hideously-patterned shower curtain, his voice bouncing brightly off the chipped tiles. He sounds about ten times more alert now, which will either be very good or very bad for me. I could use the conversation to keep me awake on the road, but I’ve seen how hyper Brendon can get on long car rides and I’m really not in the mood to punch him today. I grab my toiletries bag off the sink, and I’m digging around for my toothbrush when there’s a plastic rustle behind me and I see a dark blur appear in the steamed-up mirror. “Hey, can I borrow your razor?”  
  
“Huh? Oh, sure.” Grabbing a disposable razor out of the bag, I turn around to see Brendon’s head poked out around the side of the shower curtain, hair plastered to his head. For some stupid reason, it’s harder than it should be to keep myself from grinning as I go to hand it over. “Forget yours at HQ?”  
  
“Yeah, guess so. Thanks!” Brendon sticks an arm out to grab the razor, and the shower curtain shifts to the side in the process. A pervasive heat settles in my stomach. It’s just a few inches of space, just a second or two of time, but it might as well be some sort of slow motion. All right. Okay. I might find the little shit just the slightest bit attractive. It means nothing. I don’t care. I  _don’t._ The bathroom is dimly lit, but the guttering fluorescent set into the ceiling above the shower only serves to put all his angles and planes into sharper relief, catching on muscle tone that wasn’t there when I first met him. There’s a thin rivulet of water pooling in the hollow of his collarbone that shifts its path as he pulls his arm back into the shower, falling and tracing a path down the seashell surface of his ribcage, over the taut plane of his stomach, clinging maddeningly to the ledge of a protruding hipbone. Against my will, a choked little sound rattles in the back of my throat. It’s too loud for him to not hear it. Just before he reaches over to close the shower curtain the rest of the way, Brendon catches my eye, a positively wicked smirk settling across his lips. “Didn’t you say you came in here for your toothbrush?”  
  
“Uh… yeah.”  
  
Fuck.  _Fuck._  
  
I practically stumble out of the bathroom, gripping the edge of the dresser and breathing out a long, slow exhalation. What in the high holy hell was  _that?_  I grab for the ash tray in the windowsill, dig through my duffel bag for a pack of cigarettes, cursing under my breath. He knew what he was doing. He fucking  _knew_  what he was doing and any doubt I may have had about that was completely erased by that cocky little grin of his, burned into my mind along with several other, less-innocent images. Images like the way the tendons in his neck had shifted when he tilted his head, like the curve of his ass as he’d turned around to shut the shower curtain, like the very explicit mental picture I’d painted involving letting Dean sit out in the parking lot for an hour while I decided to take an extra shower today and wiped that stupid smirk off Brendon’s face permanently.  
  
Jesus. Two days ago, I consented to lay in the same bed with him for a few hours. Give him an inch, he takes a hundred fucking miles.  
  
I start pacing and chain smoking, trying to think of something, anything, anything but what just happened. I try to think of the weather, the time, turn on the TV and try to think of the news, but every time my brain tries to latch onto something, its grip slips until it’s back to pale skin and pointed smiles, and yeah, there goes my ability to breathe again. I sit on the edge of the unmade bed, running a hand through my hair and vaguely wishing that I could punch myself in the face without having to explain the bruises to someone later. There’s a list of reasons a mile long to tell me why I shouldn’t look at Brendon in the light I just did, one of the top items being that he’s nothing more than a case I’m working. Getting all flustered over him and his stupid face and his stupid bone structure and his stupid  _ass_  would only imply that I care about him in a fashion that extends beyond the case. And I don’t. I don’t care.  
  
And then there’s the bullet point that makes something horrible and icy clench in the pit of my stomach. Six days. It hasn’t even been a week since Summerdale, since the heartfelt promise that _I never stopped,_  and yet here I sit. I deserve the worst kind of punishment, especially when I examine my motivations a little farther. I loved Z for nine years, every single day of it, every single breath I took. I lost her once, and I thought that was the end of it, but I never really could make myself stop loving her. Maybe because I knew that she was still out there somewhere, gave the bloody ruins of my heart something to latch onto. Did I do stupid shit in those four years, fuck more people than was any form of smart, skirt too close to alcohol poisoning more than once because it made their faces look like hers? Absolutely. But that was driven by loss, not love. My love always rested with Z even though I had no idea where she was. My love rested with her even though I knew she hated me for leaving her to a fate I swore I’d never let befall her. But now that I’ve lost her a second time and I know that there’s not a chance in hell of ever finding her again, something within that love has shifted. It’s still present, and  _fuck_ , does it still hurt, but it’s something that I can’t explain. Before, love was a hand in mine going down the highway and a sleepy alto whisper to wake me up in the morning, a hand settled over my heartbeat to put me to sleep at night. Now, love is a rotting corpse on the floor of an abandoned factory in Alabama, and it almost feels like it’s trying to move over and make room for something else.  
  
I don’t want it to go anywhere. Loving a corpse is so much safer than loving a living thing that you could lose in the blink of an eye. I don’t want to lose the love that’s kept me just on the functional edge of insanity. Those other things out there calling to me with dark eyes and siren songs? I can’t let them mean anything. It will undo me.  
  
Brendon comes out of the bathroom still humming to himself, a towel hanging low on his hips. I stub my cigarette out and walk out the door without a word, breezing past Dean in the parking lot and going to the Mustang to wait for him. So Brendon’s beautiful. So he acts like I’m something worth far more than what I actually am, and it makes me happier than I’ve been in a long damn time. So I’m terrified of seeing him lose that inherent light beneath his skin. So he looks at me like he  _wants me_  sometimes, and it makes something heavy and longing settle in my chest. So what? So Brendon Urie is this convoluted, dangerous, beautiful enigma that tripped into my path, and now it’s my call to decide what I want that to mean for me. It shouldn’t mean anything. If it means something, then that would mean I care. And I don’t.  
  
I don’t care.

* * *

  
I make a solid effort to act like nothing’s wrong all the way from Omaha to Cheyenne, blasting my music and making conversation with Brendon that’s actually a little more animated than it might have been under normal circumstances. For once, it’s me that’s the conversationalist, prattling on to fill the silence that he begins to fall into the closer we get to the Wyoming border. I tell him about the time I had to save Pete from a really cranky ex-girlfriend who ended up being a witch, about how there’s a swimming hole in the country outside of Summerdale with a rope swing that I fell off of and broke my leg when I was seven and how Spencer had to drag me home. I tell him about cars since he asked me once, giving him an introductory course as we roll across the middle of Nebraska with nothing but cornfields to mark our passing. I talk until my throat aches because I’m scared of what a silence between us will bring to light.  
  
Right before we take the exit for Cheyenne, Brendon pulls the hex bag I made him out from under the collar of his shirt - a nice one, the white-button-up-and-vest affair that he wore when we went to check out the Williams house. Dressing to impress, I guess - and starts twisting the cord back and forth between his fingers, looking pensive.  
  
“You okay, kid?” I ask, watching Dean’s blinker signal light up in front of me before clicking on my own as well. “You’ve been kinda quiet.”  
  
“Yeah, just… nervous, I guess. I mean, if this is what you’re saying it is, then that’s it. Today’s the day.” Brendon looks like he might throw up from just saying the words, and I immediately feel like an ass. In my effort to shield my own brain from the things I didn’t want to think about, I’ve forgotten what today means to him, facing down the thing he’s been running from, the thing that killed his whole family. Yeah, I’d be quiet, too. “Are you sure this plan’s going to work?”  
  
Something about how raw his voice sounds makes my resolve solidify, hands flexing on the steering wheel. “I already told you, she ain’t gonna lay a finger on you.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
He leaves it at that, and while most people might see it as being kind of clipped or short, it implies a sort of trust that’s become commonplace between us. One makes a promise, the other one believes it. It’s the simplest way to operate. With everything we’ve been through, neither of us can afford to not trust each other. Doubt takes up too much time and too much brain power. We haven’t had time from the start, and if we devote less than a hundred percent to averting this utter shitstorm, everything’s going up in flames. So, in a fashion, unconditional trust is our only viable option. That’s why it shouldn’t make a pleasant warmth flash under my skin that Brendon no longer questions the validity of my word. He just takes it for what it is, but I’m an idiot to think that his trust stems from any kind of personal loyalty. It’s a trust born of mutual benefit, and to assume anything else would be to assume that he cares. And he doesn’t. And neither do I.  
  
I nod and maintain the silence, switching lanes long enough to pass Dean since I know our final destination better than he does. Our two cars roll through mild traffic and into a residential area, nothing but the sound of tires on pavement and Martina McBride’s greatest hits to provide a soundtrack for the beginning of the end.  
  
The split-level house with whitewashed siding that we pull up to doesn’t look all that different from the other ones in the neighborhood, but the girl waiting in the driveway sticks out like a sore thumb here in the midst of monochromatic suburbia. Her hair is long and wild and mottled with different colors of dye, braided around beads and feathers that brush her shoulders with every movement. She looks like an outgrown teenage hellion with her twin nose rings and edgy clothes, but she stands like a professional, spine straight and eyes focused. All of that breaks when I shut off the engine and climb out of the car, though, her impassive face splitting into a wide smile as she runs over and throws her arms around my waist. “Hey, doofus. Long time no see.”  
  
“Wish a reunion could be on better terms than this,” I smirk, giving her a quick squeeze before pulling back to get a better look at her. “Radiant as ever, Sierra. When’s Blake gonna get that stick out of his ass and let me buy you a drink sometime?”  
  
“Well, he’s on a surprise case right now, so talk to me after we wrap this up. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Sierra grins, eyes widening as Dean’s Impala pulls up behind my car and he and Sam both pile out, stretching their road-weary limbs. “Holy… when you said ‘big players’ I didn’t think you meant the freaking  _Winchesters_ , Ryan. You might’ve warned me.”  
  
“We were last minute additions,” Sam explains, extending his hand and giving Sierra’s a firm shake. “And we like to stay under the radar on principle.”  
  
She nods and leans over to shake Dean’s hand next. Sierra’s tiny in comparison to all of us, five-foot-nothing with pixie-like features and a clever grin. She’s one of those compact but dangerous types, though. There’s a strong set to her shoulders, an aura in the way she carries herself that will let any interested party know that she’s a badass from fifty yards away. A lot of girl hunters take up similar attitudes to compensate for the disadvantage that their gender gives them in a male-dominated field, but with Sierra, you can tell it’s not just an act. I think I can almost see Dean flinch, surprised at how strong her grip is. She must see it too, grinning impishly and turning to look at the tousle-haired form pulling itself out of the Mustang’s passenger side. “Brendon. Hi.”  
  
“Um… you know me?” he asks uncertainly, immediately sticking to my side like I’m some sort of human security blanket. I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I feel a little better now that we aren’t separated by metal and too much distance for my taste. Almost in time with Brendon, a small spark of unease flickers up my spine. I thought I hadn’t mentioned names when I brought Sierra up to speed on the situation. Did I slip?  
  
“ _Everyone_  knows you. An impending Apocalypse perks up a lot of ears, and Pete Wentz isn’t known for his discretion,” she rolls her eyes, sticking out her hand. “Sierra Kusterbeck. I’ll be taking you on the insider’s tour of Samuel Colt’s Devil’s Gate this afternoon.”  
  
Brendon shakes her hand like the gentleman he is, but I notice that Sierra holds onto him for just a beat longer than normal, her thumb pressed curiously to the inside of his wrist. “Your pulse is going a hundred miles an hour, kiddo. You okay?”  
  
“Just a little anxious,” he croaks, looking at me like I’m supposed to say something. I don’t.  
  
“Yeah, well, just remember to keep breathing. Gotta keep your blood oxygenated or you’ll pass out,” Sierra smirks, letting go of Brendon’s hand and turning to me with a skeptical look. “You never told me exactly what it is you boys are planning to do at the Gate.”  
  
“Need to know basis,” Dean grumbles, cutting me off before I can even start speaking. “But we could use an extra pair of hands, especially someone who knows the turf, so that’s where you come in, princess.”  
  
“Call me princess again and I’ll castrate you with a rusty spoon,” she smiles sweetly, pulling a set of car keys out of her purse and toying with them absently. In her hands, they could probably kill someone. “Besides, I heard you and Sam have had your share of dealings with the stupid old thing anyway. I wouldn’t presume to know more than you do.”  
  
“Sam and Dean had one incident at the Gate, Sierra. You patrol the damn thing every weekend. I want someone who’s really got the lay of the land with us in case something gets nasty,” I explain. My attention’s not on Sierra, though, not on Dean or Sam or any of them. It’s on Brendon, the slight stutter of his movements, the way I can see the frantic rise and fall of his breaths shifting beneath the fabric of his shirt. He looks close to the state he was in that night in the alley, covered in blood and reachable only by my whispered _Come back to me._ I can see his hands shaking. I have the strangest temptation to reach down and twine my fingers up with his, stall their tremors and tell him without words that he’ll be all right. He has to be all right. For the world’s sake, though, not for mine. Nothing he does is for my sake, and I like it that way. Makes it easy to not care. I don’t move besides a subtle shift a few inches in Brendon’s direction, a short moment of connection where his eyes meet mine. They’re bottomless and scared, dark pits spiralling downward to the depths of some terror I can’t fathom.  
  
 _It’s okay_ , I mouth, making sure that Sierra and the Winchesters are too immersed in their own conversation to notice. Brendon nods, swallows heavily, and as I turn back around to participate with everyone else, our hands brush. His are no longer shaking. Mine are.  
  
I light a cigarette with fumbling fingers and decide to blame the cold.  
  
“You two are precious,” Sierra smirks. I flip her the bird with a deadpanned expression, and all it does is make her laugh. “But I have to ask. How does Ryan Ross get pulled into the end of the world? I always thought that was a Winchester sort of thing.”  
  
“I didn’t know what I was gettin’ myself into. Believe me, I didn’t sign up for this,” I sigh, exhaling a cloud of smoke upwards into the steely winter sky and feeling like my insides weigh a ton. “I met Brendon a few weeks ago on a case in Minnesota, and it all just sorta snowballed from there.”  
  
“Casually bumping into the harbinger of the End Times. Lucky you.”  
  
“Yeah, lucky me,” I glower, grinding my cigarette out under my boot. “You said Blake wasn’t here?”  
  
“Oh, yeah, he’s sitting this one out,” Sierra says hurriedly, waving my question off. “Got a call about some Skinwalkers taking over a local pound in Lincoln. Blake was the only one they could get on the job, and he seems to think I’ll be fine with this by myself.”  
  
For some reason, the story doesn’t sit well with me. If there’s one thing I know about Blake Harnage, it’s that he makes it his business to follow Sierra around like a helicopter. She’s pretty young to be as prominent of a hunter as she is, too reckless for her own good and quick to jump the gun. Blake’s universally known as her overprotective big brother figure, constantly hovering over her shoulder to make sure she doesn’t do anything too foolish. The last time I worked a case with the two of them, he hadn’t even let her go out to get EMF readings on an empty building with me unless we let him tag along. Is it really feasible for him to just drop everything and leave her juggling something on an Apocalyptic level for the sake of some Skinwalkers that didn’t even show up on Pete’s radar?  
  
Something about this feels… off. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but there’s something happening here that I’m missing.  
  
“Shame he already rolled out. I’d have liked to see him,” I shrug, leaning against the Mustang’s front bumper and watching the front door of the house curiously. “Who’s he buyin’ his silver rounds from lately? I’m in the market for a new supplier.”  
  
“Still making his own, actually. He’d probably sell you a few boxes if I put in a good word. Anyway, bigger fish. What does me taking you out to Colt’s Gate have to do with the end of the world?” There’s a certain clipped quality to Sierra’s voice that makes it clear that the subject of Blake is no longer up for discussion. Weird. Maybe they had some sort of fight before he left.  
  
Brendon looks increasingly more antsy, shifting his weight back and forth between his feet before giving up on staying in one place and starting to pace around the car. Sam whispers something to him that I can’t quite make out as he passes by, but Brendon just shakes his head and keeps moving, scuffing his shoes along the pavement. I watch him for a long stretch of time, too preoccupied with making sure that he doesn’t wander into traffic or something to remember that I still haven’t answered Sierra’s question until I look back at her and see a raised eyebrow and a knowing smile. “Yeah, unfortunately, it’s like Dean said. Need to know basis, complicated stuff. That Gate’s an important location in this whole thing, and we need to get Brendon there to do a little bit of an experiment. We’re tryin’ to figure out what’ll happen if we put him there.”  
  
“Sounds dangerous.”  
  
“It is. You still up for it?”  
  
“You bet your skinny ass I’m still up for it,” Sierra cackles, throwing open the passenger side door of the Mustang and hopping in the back seat. “Let’s go!”  
  
“Uh… Sierra,” Sam says carefully, taking a few steps toward the car with his hands in his pockets. “We appreciate the enthusiasm, but you  _do_  know that we’re dealing with a literal force of evil, right? Things could potentially get pretty dangerous. I’m just making sure that you know what you’re signing up for.”  
  
“I laugh in the face of danger, Sammy,” she says boredly, examining her nails while the nickname earns her a sharp glare from Sam and Dean both. “C’mon, Ross, get your boy toy in the vehicle and let’s get moving. That Gate’s creepy as all  _h_ _ell_  after sundown.”  
  
I glare at her halfheartedly for the comment, shutting the car door and walking over to where Dean’s getting ready to start the Impala. “You guys ready for this?”  
  
“As ready as we’re gonna get,” he shrugs, fiddling with his radio and nodding towards my car. “Your friend doesn’t seem half as reliable as you made her out to be.”  
  
Grimacing, I fiddle with the zipper of my jacket and feel the need to justify my actions, which is a rare occurrence. “Sierra’s… a bit of a loose cannon, yeah. But she’ll be an asset, Dean, I swear. She’s a hell of a good hunter despite actin’ like a brat sometimes.”  
  
“Explains why you two get along,” Sam snorts.  
  
I bark out an extremely fake laugh and slam Dean’s door shut, reaching for another cigarette and stalking away from the driveway. Brendon’s worked his way over to the front of the house, sitting on the porch steps and looking utterly lost. Sighing, I walk over and sit down beside him, nudging his shoulder softly. “Hey, Bren. We’re gettin’ ready to leave.”  
  
“My house looks a lot like this one,” he mutters quietly, eyes fixed on the empty hanging baskets swinging over our heads. “It’s a little bigger. Had to be, for nine people to live there. But it was split like this, had the white siding. We had a trampoline in the yard for a long time but Matt broke it when he was in high school, did something dumb and ripped right through the fabric. I refused to talk to him for a week.”  
  
I don’t really know how he expects me to respond to that. Maybe he doesn’t. But there’s something so empty and disconnected in his voice that it makes my chest ache. Without really thinking about it, I reach over and settle my hand across the nape of his neck, thumb brushing the notch of bone where it meets his spine. Brendon curls into the touch in a way that’s somewhat reminiscent of a cat, his eyes fluttering shut and a soft exhalation breezing past his lips. He looks so tired. When his eyes open again, oddly locked on mine, there’s some sort of odd veneer over them, something caught between fear and trust and one other thing I’m not even willing to name in the privacy of my own mind.  
  
His hands have been knotted together in his lap, but in a halting, uncertain movement, he reaches over and places one on my knee. I don’t stop him. A second’s pause, and then the other one settles on the thin cotton of my shirt, just above my heartbeat. I can feel it roaring against his palm. I should get up and walk away. I don’t. Instead, I look up, realize that the shrubbery growing in front of the porch effectively blocks anyone on the driveway from seeing us. I drop my cigarette into a puddle at the base of the steps, let it hiss quietly out of existence while my recently freed hand reaches up to rest against the sharp hinge of his jawline. His skin is incredibly smooth. Everything inside of me clenches into a painful knot.  
  
I only vaguely remember what kissing Brendon is like. It was quick and businesslike the last time, a means to an end, and all the finer details sort of got wiped out in the wake of the head trauma that came with an angry ghost throwing me against a wall. But my mind, my stupid, traitorous mind has no problem at all with whipping up an idyllic vision of what it might be if I were to close the few inches between us. His lips are full and soft-looking, and I can remember that much from the night at the Williams house, that softness. If I kissed him in a circumstance where he actually wanted me to, I bet he’d be pliant, responsive, that he’d taste like coffee and second chances I never thought I’d get. I bet it would make all of this incessant chatter in my head finally stop, would give me the slightest moment of peace where I’m not constantly thinking about him, about my acute awareness of his proximity to me or the way he moves when he walks or the way his eyebrows furrow and he bites his lower lip when he’s thinking about something.  
  
I bet it would be the first glimpse of heaven I’ve had in years of slogging through hell.  
  
Suddenly, sharply, I’m on my feet, blinking the haze from in front of my eyes and waiting for Brendon to get up. I don’t reach down to help him. There’s something about touching him that clouds my judgment, and you’d think I would have learned that by now. “C’mon, kid. Let’s get this disaster over with. ‘Bout time you got your justice.”  
  
Sierra gives us a weird look when we get in the car, maintaining a careful distance, but she doesn’t say anything about it as I turn the ignition and wait for Dean to back out of the driveway. I drive on autopilot, berating myself all the way up the road for being stupid, stupid, stupid. I hadn’t wanted to kiss Brendon. Not really. Wanting to kiss him would mean that I care about him in some sort of romantic fashion. And I don’t.  
  
I don’t care.

* * *

  
Well, Sierra was right on one front. This place gives me a healthy dose of the creeps.  
  
I frown as I unbuckle my seatbelt and climb out of the Mustang, perching my elbow on the roof and resting my chin on the heel of my hand. “Well if this ain’t a bad horror movie waitin’ to happen, I don’t know what is.”  
  
Brendon looks like he’s about to throw up, and I can’t exactly blame him. Even Sam and Dean look uneasy, rifling through the arsenal in their trunk as we all look out at the scene set before us. The Devil’s Gate is conveniently set up smack in the middle of an old cowboy cemetery, nothing but vacant land for miles around and the eerie sound of wind whistling through the gravestones. I can see the fallout of Sam and Dean’s last visit here, the crumbled rock and areas of devastation that are just now starting to be reclaimed years later. At the sight of it, I can’t help but wonder. If this is the havoc that breaks loose when the Gate is open for a few seconds, what happens when it gets blown off the map?  
  
Sierra’s the only one who doesn’t seem uneasy in the slightest, practically bouncing out of the back seat and running over to stand next to me with a mile-wide grin. “Okay, so what’s the big top-secret plan?”  
  
“Uh… ain’t much of one, really,” I mumble, giving her a sidelong look and popping my trunk, digging out a gun and a silver knife that I know aren’t going to do me any good. “We’re gonna just plop Brendon down in front of the gate and see what happens. Any good places Dean and Sam and I can hide that’ll keep us out of the line of sight?”  
  
“Yeah, some of those headstones will hide you if you crouch low enough,” she shrugs, looking at Sam like he’s the one that’s going to cause the biggest trouble with that. Accurate. Sierra runs her fingers thoughtfully along one of the feathers braided into her hair, looking at the distant, hulking form of the Gate. “If you three are hiding and Brendon’s standing, what am I doing here?”  
  
I frown and look over to the Impala quickly, making sure Dean and Sam are preoccupied before grabbing Sierra by the elbow and pulling her around to the other side of the car, kneeling down and pretending to check the tires. She plops down beside me on the grass with a curious tilt of her head, and I lean over, whispering. “Listen. Dean and Sam don’t want me tellin’ you too much, loose lips sink ships and all. But this thing we’re fightin’, Sierra, it’s… it’s bad. And there’s every chance that it’ll kill all of us stone dead if it decides to show up. So what I want you to do is stay with Brendon. If things get nasty, I don’t care what’s goin’ on, you get him out of here. You get him in a car and get him as far away as possible. Get him back to Chicago, and Pete and Patrick will take him from there. You gotta understand.  _Brendon is the priority in this._  Everything’s ridin’ on him. Are you okay with doin’ what I’m askin’ you to do?”  
  
For the first time all day, Sierra actually looks serious, nodding gravely and reaching down to grab my hand. “You got it, boss. From now until we leave this cemetery, no one’s touching Brendon but me.”  
  
I heave a shaky sigh and squeeze her hand gratefully before getting back to my feet. “All right, y’all, let’s get this show on the road.”  
  
Brendon pales visibly at the words, swaying a bit on his feet where he stands over by the Impala, close under Sam’s watchful eye. He looks lost, like he’s spiralling out of my reach even though he’s only a few feet away. I have to put an arm around his shoulders to guide him, leading his puppet-limbs across the dead grass until we’re all standing in front of the hulking mausoleum of the Devil’s Gate. He looks up at me when we finally come to a halt, eyes wide and dark as a cloudy night in the countryside. “I’m scared.”  
  
“I know,” I mutter, biting back the  _I’m scared too_  that licks along the backs of my teeth. Brendon doesn’t need to know that. If the only thing I can do for him at this point is be some sort of pillar of strength, then I’ll try my damndest. “Buy hey. Hey, Bren, look at me.”  
  
In some sort of preoccupied terror, he’s turned to fix his eyes on the Gate’s imposing structure, and I have to physically turn his head back until his eyes meet mine, hands pressed to his temples. “I’ll be right over here with Sam and Dean, okay? We’re not goin’ anywhere. And Sierra’s gonna be beside you the whole time. I’m makin’ you a promise right now. You’ll be fine, Brendon. Nothin’ is gonna hurt you. I swear.”  
  
“Okay,” he says in a fragile echo of our earlier conversation in the car, but he looks doubtful this time, his hands shaking as Sierra takes him by the wrist and leads him over to stand right in front of the Gate. A horrible, consuming hurt rises up in me as I make myself turn around and walk away from him. There’s no real way to describe it. It’s like I’ve cut off an extension of myself.  
  
Dean is hunkered down behind a headstone a few yards away. I walk over and pick another monument as my hiding place, looking at him curiously, a slight raise of my eyebrow.  _You got it?_  
  
He nods, holds the Colt up in reference, and jerks his head toward the gate.  _Let’s do this._  
  
“Okay, Brendon,” I call over the top of the headstone, peeking just beyond the edge of the stone. “Burn it.”  
  
Brendon nods, looking vaguely ill as he reaches into the collar of his shirt and pulls out the leather cord attached to his hex bag. Despite everything else I should be focusing on, I find myself drawn to the arch of his neck as he pulls the cord over his head, the uncertain flutter of his fingers as he hold the hex bag aloft and fumbles through his pockets to produce the Zippo I let him borrow. His hands are shaking so badly that it takes him a few attempts to get it lit, the lighter flickering to life and blazing as he holds it up to the bottom of the leather pouch. The fabric burns with a heavy, sweet smell, the smoke that rolls off of it laden with the scent of the herbs wrapped up inside. The hex bag burns away to nothing, ashes falling around Brendon’s feet in some sort of macabre snowstorm until the flames begin to climb up the cord and he drops it to the ground.  
  
And… nothing happens.  
  
The silence is oppressive. There’s no ancient demon screeching out of the sky, hell-bent on scooping Brendon up in her claws. There’s nothing but the mournful wail of the wind, nothing but everyone’s labored breathing bouncing off the backs of tombstones. It doesn’t make sense. After everything that Patrick told me about the end of the world being a schedule, all those meticulous notes on planetary alignments and how Atiria’s window of opportunity was closing, all of it for what? This? Quiet and bated breaths.  
  
“Son of a bitch,” Dean hisses beside me, a fist clenching in the dried grass beneath him. “Where is she?”  
  
“I… I don’t know. I didn’t plan for this, man!” I whisper back, raking a hand through my hair. Across the cemetery, Brendon is looking optimistically confused and Sierra is smiling kind of weirdly, but there’s no other activity in the general vicinity. I see Sam’s head pop up over a headstone on the other side of the Gate, an eyebrow raising skeptically. I make a vague ‘I don’t know’ motion at him and turn back to Dean. “We can’t just pack it all up. This is our last chance to get her, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feelin’ like there’s something wrong all day. I just can’t… _oh_.”  
  
And then it clicks. The odd sensation of something being off that I’ve had since the moment we pulled into Cheyenne, the lapses in character, Brendon’s inherent uneasiness. I’m not stupid. I’m worse than stupid. I am proud and arrogant and careless. I didn’t listen to my gut because it told me something I didn’t want to believe, and now the price for it is about to be paid.  
  
“You know, it’s a damn shame,” I snarl, standing up and grabbing the Colt from Dean. “I really liked Sierra.”  
  
And the silence is broken by Sierra  _laughing_ , a cold cackle that doesn’t sound anything like her as she turns to me, eyes flashing a brilliant viridian. “You know, for all the talk about you boys, I expected better. Are you really this slow?”  
  
Brendon realizes what’s going on too slowly for him to run. As soon as the realization dawns on his face and he takes one step toward me, there’s a hand closed in a vice grip around his wrist, an arm wrapped in a chokehold around his neck. There’s terror etched into every inch of him, enough to match the icy stabs that are rocketing up and down my spine  
  
Sam’s the first Winchester to pick his jaw up off the floor, not-subtly-enough reaching into his waistband for a knife. “Atiria, I presume?”  
  
“The one and only,” she nods.  
  
“Do I even wanna know what really happened to Blake?” I ask, my stomach churning, thinking back to the earlier story about him being out of town on a case.  
  
The thing in Sierra’s body smiles sweetly. “It was bloody, drawn-out, and involved lots of screaming. About like what I’ve got planned for little Brendon here.”  
  
There’s a gun barrel leveled between her eyes before she even finishes talking. “You might wanna re-evaluate that plan, sister.”  
  
Sierra’s - Atiria’s - eyebrows raise when she sees what I’ve got in my hand, a vague smile pulling at the corners of her lips. “Now where did you get that? That gun’s a little out of your league, Ryan.”  
  
“It’s in my league if I’m usin’ it to save the world,” I counter, pulling the hammer back and lining up the barrel with her forehead. “Let him go.”  
  
Atiria cackles, a sharp, abrasive sound that reminds me of broken glass. If anything, her grip on Brendon only tightens. “Saving the  _world!_  You’re more delusional than I thought. Is that really what you think your motivation in this is? Is your hero complex  _that_  bad?”  
  
I swallow thickly. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”  
  
“I think you do,” she grins, a merciless flash of teeth in the weakening sunlight as she tiptoes two fingers contemplatively up Brendon’s arm. “If you wanted to save the world, you’d have put a bullet in baby Bren’s head the second you found out what he was. You’re not too concerned with saving the world. You’re more invested in saving  _him_. Selfish, Ryan. Very selfish indeed.”  
  
“My motivations ain’t really a factor in me puttin’ a bullet in your skull,” I shrug, finger hovering over the trigger. I could pull it now, end it, but my hands are shaking so badly that there’s always the off chance I might not hit my target. Dean informed me explicitly that the Colt only works its mojo with kill-shots, and I find that I’m not quite so worried with the possibility of not taking the bitch out as I am with the possibility of my shot going wide and hitting Brendon. And that? That makes her right. I curse under my breath and keep my aim on target as best I can, both Dean and Sam hovering in the background with no real options but to watch the showdown. I have to get her to move far enough away from Brendon that I can get a confident shot in, but the only question is how to do it? Well, there’s one thing I learned from watching Batman as a kid on a daily basis. In a pinch? Get the bad guy monologuing. “How did you beat us out here?”  
  
“You know, I actually didn’t,” Atiria muses, examining her nails boredly like she’d sooner be anywhere but here. “See, Mrs. Urie wasn’t really a viable vessel, what with the huge chunk of skull her baby boy took out of the back of her head. Didn’t feel like fixing her up, so I smoked out, decided to find someone in the area of the Sacred Gate. Sierra was a decent option because of all the info in her pretty little noggin. You should have heard her scream when I strung her partner up with his own intestines.”  
  
“Blake didn’t have to die,” I hiss. “He didn’t have a part in any of this.”  
  
“I know he didn’t. I was bored.” I think back to what Patrick said about evil as a concept being different from anything I could possibly imagine. The thing about bad people is that there’s alway a small redeeming quality somewhere. But Bad itself? It’s irredeemable. Atiria just laughs when she sees the horrified look on my face, rolling her eyes. “Oh, please. Don’t get all high and mighty on me, Ryan Ross. I can always bring up the long list of people whose blood is on your hands. But at any rate, your silly little hex bag actually did manage to take Brendon off my radar. I was getting honestly worried until you called me. And here all my problems are solved!”  
  
Heavy, leaden realization seeps into my veins. “You mean you didn’t know where he was?”  
  
“Not until you so graciously delivered him to me.” She throws her head back and  _howls_ , laughing until tears of mirth well up in those unnaturally viridian eyes. “And isn’t that just the kicker in all of this!  _You’re_  the Prophecy’s Hero? I laughed for ages when I found that out. You’ve never saved anything important in your life. Then you finally get the chance to do something on a bigger scale, and you bring the one person Fate charged you with protecting straight to the slaughter. What a miserable failure you are.”  
  
My fault. This is my fault. It takes everything I have in me not to double over and throw up. I make the horrible mistake of looking at Brendon, and the quiet, frightened betrayal on his face rips me apart at the seams. I brought him to this. I handed him right over to her with a smile and the reassurance that everything would be all right. Stupid. I’ve been so unforgivably stupid. “Doesn’t matter, does it? I can still end it right here.”  
  
“We both know you don’t want to do that.” For the briefest second, Atiria looks almost placating, like she’s not the one in the wrong here. “It’s not in your true nature.”  
  
“You don’t know  _shit_  about my true nature,” I snarl, feeling like my heart is about to jump out of my chest.  
  
Atiria shifts just the slightest bit, arms slackening their grip around Brendon’s neck long enough for her to take one step towards me, two, three, smiling warmly. “Oh, sweetheart. Don’t you know? I’m the mother of all the Evil in the world. And I always know my children.”  
  
I don’t even flinch when I pull the trigger and sink a bullet straight between her eyes.  
  
Her head snaps back in what feels like slow motion, lips still half-extended around some unidentified word. I wait with a victorious smile stretching across my face for her to explode, to dissolve into ash, to crumple to the ground.  
  
She doesn’t.  
  
“Ow, that stung!” she yells, wincing and rubbing at the bullet-hole in her forehead until new skin grows over it and it’s like nothing never even hit her. “Bad news, kiddo. I’m the original force of Evil. There’s only five things that little peashooter can’t kill, and I’m one of ‘em.”  
  
With a sudden jerk, the Colt is ripped out of my hands by an unseen force, pinwheeling through the air until Atiria catches it one-handed and shoves it in her waistband. Dean makes a strangled sound of protest, almost running after it until Sam grabs him bodily around the waist and hauls him back. I don’t process any of it. One shot. I had one shot, one plan to end all of this, and it didn’t even work.  
  
She was right. I can’t save anything.  
  
“See, I was going to be nice and send you back to Chicago, but since you decided to be petulant, you can stay around and watch.” Atiria snaps the fingers of her free hand, and in a plume of green smoke, a wicked-looking dagger appears, all honed edges and malicious intent. “The time’s not quite right, but I think it’s close enough.”  
  
I don’t hear her chanting. I don’t see Sam and Dean rushing forward to hold me back. I don’t even hear the scream that almost rips my throat in two.  
  
The only thing I can process is the jerk of her arm, the vicious downward arc of the blade.  
  
The bloody ruin that Brendon’s chest becomes when it finds its mark.  
  
Blood has a different color to it than most people think. When you grow up only seeing gore in the movies, you expect it to be bright red, flowing freely and looking almost like a caricature of itself. The truth of the matter is that blood is dark and sticky and gelatinous, especially when it’s welling up from a wound that splits a person open from sternum to navel. Brendon’s looks almost black as it spatters on the grass, seeping past the futile efforts of his grasping hands to hold all that sacred blood, not to mention his insides, where they’re supposed to be.  
  
The ground shudders beneath my feet, a deep rumble from within the earth that rattles my bones. This is it. This is how it all ends. The surface of the Devil’s Gate cracks with a resigned groan, like it knows it’s only a matter of time before it’s blasted into oblivion. But then it’s not. The ground stills. The silence returns.  
  
Atiria screams.  
  
“ _No!_  No, it was supposed to work!  _It was supposed to work!_ ”  
  
“Bren,” I whisper.  
  
“How many more generations before I get another one?! How long before the bloodline dies out?!”  
  
“Bren.”  
  
 _“It was supposed to work!”_  
  
Somewhere in her cataclysm of fury, Atiria decides that we’re no longer worth her time. I don’t see her disappear, only surmise that she’s gone based on the fact that Dean actually lets go of me. Time takes on the same weird, skittering quality that it did when I lost Z. One second I’m by the gravestone, and the next I’m watching Brendon fall to the ground, running over and throwing myself to my knees in the bloodstained grass, pulling his head into my lap. My breaths are wild, frantic, matching up with each of his weak, wheezing ones as I pull the ruins of his vest off his shoulders and try to use it to stop the bleeding. “Nuh-uh, kid. You don't get to leave me.”  
  
“Ry,” he croaks, hand blindly seeking out mine. I lace my fingers up with his and shake my head, denying this, denying all of it.  
  
“You’re gonna be okay,” I say resolutely, like it’s a fact. I refute everything that tells me otherwise, the unsteady flutter of his pulse beneath my fingers, the ever-growing puddle of blood around us. “You have to be. Remember all that prophecy bullshit, Bren? Our fates are one. You go, I go, remember?”  
  
He tries to say something, but only manages a strangled cough, blood spurting over his lips. I can feel organs shifting around under the bunched-up vest in my hand with the motion, and I gag, trying to find something to ground me in all of this. Nothing. There’s nothing. The only thing that could possibly ground me is bleeding out in my arms, going into shock, eyes rolling back in his head.  
  
“Stay with me, Brendon,” I practically choke out, not even having the strength to care about how broken I sound, pressing the cloth to his abdomen and everything is red, red, red, red on my skin, red on his shirt, red in the color of my panicked pulse roaring against the linings of my veins. “Eyes on me, all right? Stay.”  
  
But his eyes are glazing over, his hand clenched around my arm is going slack, his pulse is slowing and God help me (why would he?) it’s happening again, the same way it always does. I’d tried to keep the both of us safe by insisting to myself that I didn’t care, but  _damn_  Dean for being right and calling me out on the things I wouldn’t even admit to the depths of my own mind. I care.  
  
Brendon’s pulse stops fluttering against my skin, eyes empty and sightless as a final rattle of a breath shudders past his lips. Gone.  
  
“No,” I whisper, shaking my head numbly. This isn’t happening. I didn’t lose him. I never lose him. He’s always just within my reach; I only need to remember what it takes to make him whole and smiling and  _mine_  again. Dean’s trying to pull me away but I shove him off of me, cradling Brendon’s too-cold face in bloodstained hands and denying the reality of it all. “Don’t be gone. Please don’t be gone. Bren. Come back to me.  _Come back to me, dammit!_ ”  
  
Nothing. There is nothing left of him. Just as there is nothing left of me. Maybe the prophecy was right after all. Our fates are one.  
  
In a cataclysm of loss I break down crying, screaming, begging for some sort of absolution I can’t ever seem to get. And I care.  
  
I care a lot.


	12. Chapter 11 - Brendon

 

 

Dying doesn’t hurt. Not really.  
  
Well, there’s some debatable areas as far as that statement’s concerned. The  _process_  of dying hurts a hell of a lot, especially when your method of going out is something as horrific as being eviscerated, trying to hold your guts in while the earth shudders underneath your feet and a demon howls her rage right into your ear. There are things that hurt besides the wound. The ache of my depleted veins as they try to cycle something that isn’t there. The throbbing agony in my head that’s a cue of oxygen deprivation.  
  
But it’s Ryan’s scream that takes my heart and crushes it into oblivion. That hurts more than all of the rest put together.  
  
Everything’s fuzzy; nothing feels real except the pain and the mingled shouts cutting through my faltering consciousness. Somewhere in the muddle, there’s suddenly nothing holding me up anymore, an absence of support that leaves me teetering on my useless legs until the ground comes rushing up to meet me. That hurts, too. I groan faintly and stare up at the steely-gray sky, musing that it could have been worse. At least the world’s not ending. Just me.  
  
Ryan’s face slips into my field of vision, shaky, spindly hands tugging the vest off my shoulders and pressing it to the horror-show that my torso has become. The contact hurts so badly that my perception all fades into agonizing white for a second, blinding pain that only fades once I start going into shock. At least, I think I’m going into shock. For some reason, the physical hurt is gone, and that’s either shock or God giving me one small break in this whole nightmare of a life. I can’t feel the pain, can barely feel Ryan’s hand pressed to the side of my face. But I can feel the fear in his eyes. I feel it all the way down to my bones. “Nuh-uh, kid. You don’t get to leave me.”  
  
 _Ryan, you’re being a stubborn asshole. I’m already gone._  That’s what I want to say, but the thought suddenly makes me so much more scared than I was before, and I honestly don’t know how much strength I have left. I don’t want to be the last thing I ever say to him to be some sort of rebuke. So instead, I settle for clinging to his hand, watching him through the pervasive gray eating at the edges of my vision. It’s funny, in a way. All of these thoughts of dying that I’ve been having for weeks, and I never thought to formulate my last words. Maybe because up until now, I didn’t think anyone would be around to hear them. I should come up with something poignant, some statement that will  _mean_  something, but through the stuttering disconnections in my head and the thick taste of copper on my tongue, all I can come up with is a slurred “Ry...”  
  
And that means something. It means everything.  
  
“You’re gonna be okay,” he responds, holding onto my hand with a steel grip that’s determined to keep me here despite whatever the world has to say about it. “You have to be. Remember all that prophecy bullshit, Bren? Our fates are one. You go, I go, remember?”  
  
No, that’s not how it is. At least I get that little bit of satisfaction, that the prophecy was wrong on that front. In the wake of the heavy numbness settling in my limbs, I can still feel the sigh of relief that comes with the realization. Ryan’s going to be okay. He’ll move on because it’s what he does best. He’ll keep living, keep hunting, keep running. The only difference is that I won’t be running with him.  
  
Strangely enough, I’ll miss it, that running. The transient lifestyle I picked up over the past few weeks has been the closest thing to stability I’ve felt in a long time, maybe the closest to home I’ve _ever_  felt. I’m too far gone to stare down the end with anything other than a resigned peace, but I’ll miss it. I’ll miss him.  
  
I’ll miss the sleepy drawl of his voice first thing in the morning before he’s had his coffee, miss discovering the way he pronounces certain words like  _differn’t_  and  _crick_ , miss hearing him whisper along to any Johnny Cash song that happens to be playing in his presence. I’ll miss the absent drumming of his fingers on the steering wheel, the smell of Old Spice and Marlboro Reds clinging to the leather of his jacket. I’ll miss the smile I’ve only seen a handful of times, the real one, the one that lights up his eyes like sunlight through a glass of whiskey and lends something warmer to the way he holds himself.  
  
Living my life in a permanent state of fear was hell. I won’t miss that. But I’ll miss Ryan more than I’ll miss my own existence, and I guess there’s something to be said for that. Maybe that’s how people are supposed to feel when they’re woven into Fate’s tapestry together. The rest of the world has a way of becoming irrelevant, and you’re so caught up that you don’t even notice until long after everything else has fallen away and it’s too late to say all the things you were never brave enough to put out into the open.  
  
 _I should have kissed you back at the house,_  I try to tell him, but all that comes out is a bloody gurgle. Everything is blurry, swimming out of focus, but just before that layer of fuzzy blackness settles over my eyes and turns the world into a blank slate, the last thing I see is Ryan looming over me, desperate and scared-looking. “Stay with me, Brendon. Eyes on me, all right? Stay.”  
  
I wish I could. God, do I wish I could.  
  
The darkness takes me, and the last thought I have is that he was crying. I died, he was holding me, and he was crying. At least when I went, I went knowing that someone wanted me to stay. Even if in his own limited way, Ryan cared for me. And me? Well, I acknowledged it days before I bled out in his arms.  
  
I think I was a little bit in love with him.

* * *

_“How long until he wakes up?”  
  
“I’m not certain he’ll wake up at all. I’m not exactly at my full potential, and he was effectively dead by the time I could get to him, anyway.”_  
  
The voices filter through the dark like small, soft rays of sunlight, punctuating the blackness and stirring me into something. Not exactly consciousness, but something. Is this the afterlife? I wonder which end of the spectrum I’ll end up on. I always tried to be a good person, but when you factor in the raging homosexuality and the fact that I shot my mother in the head, I don’t think I’m necessarily in the Big Guy’s good books. Heaven would be nice in the respect that I’d get to see my family again, but I know what to expect from the other place. Hell is the landscape of my Ambien-nightmare a few days ago, watching the blood-soaked bodies of everyone I love parading past me with a silent symphony of blame playing their death march. I’ve seen Hell. It looked exactly like Ryan’s corpse.  
  
 _“Did Ross come around?”  
  
“I don’t believe so. He hasn’t moved yet.”_  
  
No. No, no, it’s not supposed to be like this. The prophecy was supposed to be wrong and I was supposed to go  _alone_ ; that was my only source of comfort in dying at all. What could have happened to change that? I know better than to think Ryan’s the Romeo and Juliet type to go fling himself off a bridge or something in the name of something he probably never even felt on the same level as I did. Did Atiria come back to finish what she started? Did the Gate crumble in some sort of delayed reaction? Has the whole world ended despite my best efforts to stop it?  
  
I didn’t die for this. I didn’t die just to lose everything all over again.  
  
I drag myself into a full state of awareness, and the first thing I process are a pair of bright green eyes looking down at me.  
  
Panic constricts around my throat like a noose and I can feel a scream lodging painfully in my lungs, but after a second of paralyzing fear, I start to see the bigger picture. Those eyes are very green, yes, but they’re also  _human_  and narrowed in concern, set into freckled skin and handsome, chiseled features.  
  
“I’ll be damned. Welcome back, Brendon. You were off the map there for a second,” Dean sighs, rocking back on his heels and raking a hand through his hair. As my vision clears, so does my understanding of what’s going on. I’m still in the cemetery, the sky gray and dismal overhead, the hot stickiness of my own blood congealing beneath me. Behind Dean are two other figures looking down at me, Sam’s familiar huge silhouette and some scruffy guy in a trenchcoat that I’ve never seen before. My chest rises and falls. I’m breathing. There’s a persistent thump against my ribs. My heart’s beating. Against every law of science there is, I’m alive. But that doesn’t bother me as much as the absence of one face from this impossible scene.  
  
“Ryan,” I croak, somehow not surprised that he’s the first thing on my mind after I’ve come back from the dead. I try to sit up and holy  _fuck_  that’s a bad idea, pain rocketing through my torso and stealing my breath.  
  
“Easy, chief,” Dean warns, planting a hand on my shoulder and pushing me back to the ground. “Ross is in the car. He had some sort of psychotic break when you clocked out on us. Wouldn’t let go of you long enough for us to do what we needed to do, so Sam had to knock him out. We’re more worried about you right now.”  
  
My brain’s still fuzzy, a tired groan scraping up my throat as I try to soak everything in. I bled out, here on this grass. I died, and Ryan was holding me and I thought that hey, maybe I could be okay with dying if that was how it ended. I should be dead. I’m not dead. Mind-fuck doesn’t even begin to touch it. “...How?”  
  
Dean blinks at me for a few seconds until he figures out what I’m trying to ask, grinning and clapping the guy in the trenchcoat on the shoulder. “Yeah, you’re probably only going to be conscious for a few more seconds since your body needs time to reset, so I’ll make a long story short. This is Castiel, he’s our angel-in-residence, and he saved your ass. Cas, Brendon Urie. Brendon, Cas.”  
  
“Salutations,” Trenchcoat Guy - Cas - nods.  
  
“Yeah, hi,” I whisper, thinking something fragmented about how I thought angels were supposed to wear togas and halos before my world tunnels into blackness again.

* * *

Time passes in odd flashes of awareness, a handful of times that I manage to drag my eyes open for a few seconds before slipping back into the dark. There’s no time, no scope of understanding, just little blips on the radar of my addled mind that I hold onto in some effort to get myself through the long stretches of nothingness. I remember the rumble of an engine. The soft comfort of a big bed with clean sheets. The sight of sunlight slanting through a window. Dean’s voice rising through the floorboards beneath me. A hand wrapped around mine. There’s a weird, repeated memory that I can’t rationalize, the juxtaposed sound of a full-bodied guitar and a thin, reedy voice that sings everything from Hank Williams to Zeppelin to pretty, intricate ballads that I’ve never heard before.  
  
It’s one of those songs that finally pulls me back into the world of the living, eyes dragging themselves open for longer than a few seconds. The room I’m in is pretty but unfamiliar, sporting trendy minimalist decor that matches the plain white down comforter draped over me. There’s still sunlight shining through the window to my left, a slight golden hue suggesting late afternoon. I have no idea how long it’s been since the graveyard, but if the stiffness in my limbs is any indicator, it’s been a while. The music’s been floating through my brain for a while now, all languid turns of phrase and mournful minor chords. It would be easy to let it lull me back to sleep, but I don’t, blinking the haze from my eyes and struggling through the sharp pain in my abdomen to sit up, looking for the source.  
  
Ryan’s curled in on himself in a far corner of the room, his body wrapped around the worn wood of an old Gibson acoustic like it’s his last anchor in the world. Notes bloom under his fingers like there’s no effort to them at all, floating across the still air in time with the soft melody he’s singing under his breath. It’s like he’s breathing that music, letting it consume him, and it’s the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time. He frowns, stops playing, leans over to scribble something out in a notebook on the floor in front of him. A few more tentative chords rise out of the guitar before he grumbles something and leans his head back to rest on the wall.  
  
When he sees me, it’s like looking at someone who’s seen a ghost. I guess in the literal sense, he has.  
  
“Holy shit,” he whispers, dropping the guitar on the white carpet before scrambling to his feet and rushing over to sit on the edge of the bed, looking at me like he’s not sure I’m real. Hell,  _I’m_ still working on figuring that out. I can see a whole myriad of things flickering behind his eyes, but the only thing I get is a long, tense silence eventually broken by a cautious smile. “Hi, Bren.”  
  
There are a lot of things that I could say, too. Instead I smile back at him, trying out a voice that’s more of a tired croak. “I like the song. You write?”  
  
“Only when I got time, which is pretty much never,” Ryan shrugs. He looks like a trainwreck. The shadows of sleeplessness beneath his eyes look more like bruises, his skin holding a sickly, waxy pallor. The planes of his face look gaunt and half-starved, a few days’ stubble casting a shadow across his jaw. It’s painfully obvious that he’s running on some cocktail of caffeine and nicotine and Jack Daniels, his hands jittering where he rests them on his knees. You could probably knock him over with a feather. But his eyes are all intensity and bright awareness when he looks at me, far more alive than the rest of him. “But that’s not important. How’re you feelin’?”  
  
“About as good as a zombie can feel, I guess.” My attempt to laugh doesn’t end well, a spike of pain rocketing through my torso that makes me double over, groaning. Clutching my stomach, I manage to sit back upright after a minute, leaning back against a nest of pillows propped against the headboard with Ryan’s help. Half-afraid of what I’ll see, I look down at my body, wondering how it’s possible for me to be functioning when I’m fairly certain I watched Atiria step on my spleen. Thankfully, there’s no bloody carnage, no horror-movie wounds or botched surgical fix-ups. All that remains is a long, ragged scar stretching from my chest down to the waistband of my sweatpants, red and painful but otherwise a definite improvement from my insides being on my outsides. Technically impossible, but you know what they say about looking a gift horse in the mouth. After a beat, I notice the leather cord wrapped around my neck, the little pouch at the end. A new hex bag. “I’ve got questions.”  
  
“I got answers,” he replies, shifting a little bit to the right so we can see each other better. God, he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. “Shoot.”  
  
“How long was I out?”  
  
Ryan pauses, counting on his fingers. “Uh, ‘bout five days, I reckon. You were in and out of consciousness the whole time, but you were never with it enough to talk to me.”  
  
“You were here this whole time?” Something rises in my chest until it’s a struggle to breathe.  
  
“Dean was pissed about it, but yeah, ‘course I was.” He looks at me like I’m some sort of moron for not knowing that automatically. “I’ve only been in this room and the bathroom since we brought you here.”  
  
I try to stomp down on the stupid sense of contentment humming through my veins. It doesn’t work. “And where’s ‘here,’ exactly?”  
  
“Sierra’s house. After what happened, we figured this would be the last place Atiria would come pokin’ around, but we’ve got Angel mojo all over the place to hold her off if she does.” I can kind of see where I am now that I’ve finally learned my location. The big apple tree in the front yard has some branches peeking just inside of the view from the window. I’m in one of the rooms above the front porch, overlooking the expanse of the yard. Off in the distance, I can see the Mustang parked in the driveway, pulled up alongside Dean’s Impala like two old friends. Ryan traces my line of sight and sighs, nodding at the little pouch around my neck. “New hex bag. Atiria thinks you’re dead. You keep that thing on, you stay dead to her. It’s the best way to keep you safe. If she knows you’re alive, she’ll just hunt you down and try the ritual again at the right time.”  
  
“Yeah, uh… can you explain how I somehow survived being gutted?” I ask, prodding carefully at the closed wound. The contact stings, but it’s definitely not the gaping, decidedly fatal thing it was before. It defies explanation, although I vaguely remember Dean mentioning something about angels and trenchcoats before I passed out last time. When you’re in this life, there’s an impossible explanation for just about everything.  
  
“Well, as soon as things went sour, Dean started sendin’ out an SOS to Castiel. Cas has himself all wrapped up in some pissin’ contest with the Archangels upstairs, so he couldn’t pop down right away, showed up right after we lost you. I was freakin’ out, Sam hit me over the head and I was out cold for the rest of it.” He looks a bit uncomfortable admitting that last part, looking at his feet and drawing his bottom lip between his teeth. “From the way I hear Dean tell it, only reason Castiel was able to save you is that your brain wasn’t quite dead when he got to you. He’s not runnin’ at full steam because of all this bullshit with the Angel war, otherwise you could’ve got up and walked outta there. But as it is, I think you’ll take a few weeks of time off to heal up over dyin’, yeah?”  
  
“I think I’m going to need a few weeks just to digest the fact that I literally have a guardian angel that saved my ass. But yeah, life. I’ll take life,” I reply tiredly, thinking of all those regrets over unsaid words I’d had while I was dying. I could say them now,  _should_  say them now, but something makes them stick to the backs of my teeth, formless and irrationally scared. I look down at where Ryan’s hand rests on the comforter, close enough for me to reach out and twine his fingers up with mine. The bony structure of it is swollen, knuckles covered in bloodstained gauze and medical tape. Frowning, I skate my fingertips over the bandages questioningly. “What happened to your hand?”  
  
Ryan snorts quietly, finally looking back up at me with a wry, sad smile. “Kept sittin’ here with you, watchin’ you lay there and knowin’ it was my fault. I was the perfect blend of drunk and angry at myself yesterday, hauled off and punched a mirror. Stupid, but I wasn’t thinkin’ clearly. When am I ever? But yeah, when you get back on your feet, don’t use the bathroom down the hall. I ain’t cleaned up the glass yet.”  
  
“It wasn’t your fault.”  
  
“Yeah, it really was.”  
  
Without really thinking about it, my hand abandons the surface of the bandage to rest on his shoulder, settling against the worn flannel of his shirt. “Ryan…”  
  
“Just stop. Stop tryin’ to justify it,” he snaps, but for once he doesn’t flinch away from the contact, his eyes dark and painfully readable in the way I’ve only seen them once or twice before. He looks half-ready to fall apart, and if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that he was leaning into my touch, seeking some sort of affirmation in it. “She never would’ve found you if I hadn’t led you right to her. She never would’ve hurt you if I’d listened to my gut and figured out that there was something up with Sierra. It was my job to keep you safe. Atiria had the right of it when she said that I’m a fuckin’ joke as far as prophesied heroes go. It was my job to protect you, and all I could do was sit there and watch you die.”  
  
The look on his face practically rips me apart all over again. Ryan’s done that thing again where he ages years over the course of days, invisible lines carved into his features by the weight of all that guilt he carries around. I’ve seen how it weighs on him firsthand. He blames himself for everyone he’s ever lost, when the fact of the matter is that in the end, he’s just the last remnant of an indescribably cruel twist of fate. I’ve seen him slay monsters. I’ve seen him save people. I’ve seen him rush headlong into danger without a single thought for himself. He’s so much more than he gives himself credit for, but his fatal flaw, the biggest curse placed on his shoulders is the tragedy of never being able to see in himself what I see in him. I see a long list of descriptors in him - stubbornness, beauty, sadness, mystery - but none of those have ever been the sum total of what he truly is.  
  
When I look at Ryan, I see a hero.  
  
“There was no way you could have known.” And honestly, there wasn’t. I can’t fault Ryan for wanting to believe in someone he thought was a friend, not when he has so few of them to begin with. I know that one domino is enough to bring all of them down, but when I weigh that one mistake in the face of everything else, in every length he’s gone to, I can’t help but find it inconsequential. I don’t blame him for it. The me of one month ago might have blamed him, but the me of now finds it an utter impossibility. “And you’re not some big cosmic failure, okay? The prophecy’s obviously got some holes, seeing as the world hasn’t blown up yet and we’re both still alive. Hell, the whole thing could be wrong -”  
  
“I hope it’s right,” Ryan says softly, cutting me off.  
  
Gaping at him, I sit silently for a moment, trying to figure out where that could have possibly come from. “What?”  
  
“The prophecy. The whole thing about our fates bein’ one. You go, I go. I hope it’s the truth.” It’s more earnest than anything I’ve ever heard him say before, a kind of vulnerability in his voice that cuts right down to the core of me. His bandaged hand settles against the side of my face, eyes locked on mine like he thinks I don’t believe him. “Back in that graveyard, I lived without you for about thirty seconds. That’s thirty seconds more than I ever wanna do it again.”  
  
I open my mouth to say something, but before I get the chance, Ryan’s lips are on mine and my world is imploding.  
  
Something in me is knocked so far off balance that it takes longer than it should to understand what’s happening. For a few moments it’s the Williams house all over again, my eyes wide and my limbs frozen in a paralytic shock. It’s kind of ironic, how I’d been the one dying with the regret of never kissing him and yet it takes an eternity of disjointed brain activity and held breaths before I kiss him back.  
  
Weeks ago, back in Summerdale, I’d thought sadly that no one had ever kissed me like I was the only source of light in their life, entertained bitter notions that no one would ever hold me like they were terrified of the world pulling me away from them. Even when I’d tried to imagine the scenario, it couldn’t come within a mile of even touching this. Ryan kisses much like one would expect him to, a cautious approach to human touch underlied with something so raw and shattered that it makes every cell of me ache. If anything, the shaky stutter of his hands has only increased, the bony structure of them skittering uncertainly over my skin, across my shoulders and the back of my neck before his fingers card through my hair, ghost along my jawline in a careful, curious manner. He’s trying to map out unfamiliar territory. The sentiment behind it is ridiculously sweet given the fact that it’s  _Ryan_. Ryan who avoids emotion like the plague, who probably bleeds whiskey and gunpowder when you cut him, and here he is, touching me like I’m this beautiful, miraculous thing. It’s the first time I’ve actually felt like I’m worth something in as long as I can remember.  
  
I realize after a beat that my hands are still balled up in the sheets, clenched so tightly that it hurts all the way up my arms. This isn’t as complicated as my stupid head is making it. Breathe. In. Out. Now for once in your life, just  _let it happen._  
  
There’s a palpable sense of liberation in that decision, the coiled tension that’s been sitting inside me for months unwinding with a hum like a plucked guitar string. I breathe out shakily against Ryan’s lips and finally let go of the covers in favor of pulling him closer, mapping out some territory of my own. He tastes like cigarettes and black coffee, chapped lips pressed insistently to mine like he’s got something to prove. I smile against his mouth and press my palm flat over the rapid thrum of his heartbeat, feeling the hitch of his breath rattle up through the sharp ridges and valleys of his ribcage. I know what’s under the thin fabric of his shirt, can feel the raised lattices of all those battle scars that had drawn my curiosity back at the very beginning. Almost unconsciously, I trace the line just to the left of the buttons, travelling down the line where the Wendigo cut him a month that feels like a million years ago. The night he got that wound, I was half-certain that I hated him. And now there’s this. Now…  
  
Now he feels like home. I feel like I’m home.  
  
Ryan’s hand settles on the nape of my neck and holds me to him, his tongue swiping across my bottom lip questioningly, like he’s not sure how far he can push the envelope before whatever fever dream this surely is shatters into a colder, more distant reality. I groan in the back of my throat and part my lips, letting him in. Everything is suddenly heated urgency, something heavy and consuming sinking into the pit of my stomach, and this,  _this_  is killing me in an entirely different way than I’ve already been killed. My other hand skates up his spine, fists in his hair, softer than I’d thought it would be. A choked, desperate sort of sound acts as my affirmation, muffled against my mouth as Ryan nips at my lip and goes to lay me back into the pillows.  
  
“Ow, shit!” A blaze of discomfort shoots up my midsection, sharp enough to steal my breath and make me jerk my head back until my mouth disconnects from Ryan’s with a definitive, wet pop. I look down, confused until I see the bright bloom of red soaking through the sheets. “Dammit.”  
  
“Oh, fuck  _me_ ,” Ryan hisses, jumping to his feet and yanking the blankets back. The motion must have pulled at my scar, opened the wound just a bit right above my navel. As I watch, a bright stream of blood wells up, spills over in a thin line to fall down onto the mattress. It’s not anything catastrophic, but by the look on Ryan’s face you’d think I was hemorrhaging, his eyes wide as he dives into the closet on the far side of the room and comes running back over with a towel in hand, pressing the fabric to my stomach. “Fuck, Bren, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinkin’,  _shit_ , that could’ve been so bad…”  
  
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” I smirk up at him, trying to mask the twinge that jitters across my nerves under the pressure of the towel. His lips are florid, wet and swollen, cheeks flushed, hair a mess. That was me. I did that.  
  
Despite my attempt at levity, the concerned frown on his face only grows deeper, every movement calculated as he gingerly lifts up the towel to get a better look at the damage. “You just can’t be movin’ around too much. The wound ain’t healed up enough for it. God, I should’ve known better, why did I -”  
  
“Ryan.” He stops rambling when I reach up to touch the side of his face, thumb brushing along his cheekbone. His eyes are big and scared and sunken-looking. I realize with an internal twinge that if he really hasn’t left this room in days, then he hasn’t been taking care of himself at all. “I’m fine. You, on the other hand, look like shit.”  
  
“Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that immediately after kissin’ someone,” he grumbles, looking affronted.  
  
“I mean it in the most caring way possible, but you still look like shit.” I think we both roll our eyes in perfect unison. “I mean it. How long has it been since you slept? How long has it been since you ate?”  
  
He shifts uncomfortably, looking out the window. “Ain’t really been hungry. Mostly just coffee. Dean made me eat a sandwich day before yesterday. And, uh… I been takin’ cat naps here and there.”  
  
“When’s the last time you slept for longer than an hour?”  
  
“Probably back at the motel. Think I got an hour and a half on Monday.”  
  
“Jesus, Ry.” He’s telling the truth, and I can see it in him. Even within five days, he’s noticeably lost weight off of his already-bony frame, and he sways unsteadily if he’s on his feet for more than a few seconds. And for what? To sit at my bedside and watch me drift in and out of the waking world, incoherent for days? I think back to what I heard Pete say about Ryan having a fucked up personal moral system, and I’m starting to see it now. When he doesn’t think the world’s punished him enough, he makes a point to punish himself. I sigh and let my hand linger on his cheek for a second before lowering it to his shoulder and pushing softly, the prominence of the bone digging into my hand. “Go. Out.”  
  
Ryan blinks at me confusedly. “Huh?”  
  
“Get out of here and take care of yourself. I’m making a solemn vow right now that I’m not kissing you again until you’ve had a full meal and a shower.”  
  
An impish grin stretches across his face, something familiar lighting up behind his eyes. In spite of being too almost too tired to stand and half-starved, Ryan still manages to look like a cat with a mouse between its paws as he plants a hand in the pillows right next to my head and leans down close enough that his breath washes across my lips in warm puffs. “Is that your way of tellin’ me that you wanna kiss me again?”  
  
“Not until you don’t look like you just walked out of a Jack London novel.” His smirk is contagious, and before I know it I’m wearing one to match, grabbing his hand and giving it a quick squeeze. “Talk to me after you’ve shaved and put more than a hundred calories in your body, then I’m all yours.”  
  
“Fine. You hungry?”  
  
“Take care of  _yourself_ , you ass,” I snap, shoving him again. Ryan laughs and walks out of the bedroom, but I’m pretty sure he hears the rumble of my stomach before he does.  
  
I wait until I hear his footsteps travelling down some distant staircase before I let the gravity of what just happened hit me. There’s an electric tingle lingering on my lips, spreading outwards across my skin until my entire body hums with it. Yes, I’d had fleeting dying thoughts about kissing Ryan, but now that it’s actually happened, I have so many more questions than answers. The idealistic part of me that might have thought that everything would just fall into place was swallowed up by my newfound cynicism a long time ago, and now I’m left curled up in the rumpled blankets with my head and heart racing to see who’s faster. He kissed me. What does that mean? He  _kissed_  me. Does it change anything?  _He kissed me._  
  
And I kissed him back.  
  
So the real question is, where do we go from here?  
  
The bleeding stops relatively quickly, but the quiet pain of the wound remains like a warning reminder, settling just below my consciousness and whispering for me to take it easy. There’s a TV sitting on top of the dresser across from the bed, and I’m debating on making an attempt to reach for the remote on the bedside table before a slight rustle of motion in the hallway makes my head snap towards the door.  
  
“Brendon. You’re awake.” Trenchcoat Guy from before is standing uncertainly in the doorframe, looking at me like he can’t figure me out. I know that if what Ryan told me is true, then I owe him my life, but everything I’ve been through has given me such an inherent distrust of strangers that I can’t help the faint spark of apprehension that flares up in the forefront of my mind. He seems to pick up on it, though, taking an awkward step into the room and fixing me with a penetrating stare from very blue eyes. “Do you remember me?”  
  
“Yeah,” I say carefully, watching every move he makes while trying to not look as suspicious as I am. “Castiel, right? You’re, uh… Dean’s friend?”  
  
“Something of the sort, yes,” he nods, taking the break in my silence as a cue that it’s okay to move within a normal social distance, standing at the foot of the bed. He’s wearing the same trenchcoat, dress shirt, and blue tie as he was back in the cemetery. Weird.  
  
“I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I’m pretty certain I owe you a thank-you. I guess you’ve got some sort of mojo that saved me.” The motion of sitting up makes my torso scream, but I do it slowly and carefully, sticking my hand out in his direction.  
  
Castiel just kind of stands there, looking at my hand like he’s not sure what to do with it, head tilting curiously to the side. “I’m an Angel of the Lord, if that’s what you’re deeming ‘mojo.’ But yes, I was able to somewhat heal you. Now that you’re awake I can do a better job of it. If I had my full scope of power you could have made a full recovery instantaneously, but as it is, we needed to let your body stabilize for a few days before I could try anything again. Ryan came downstairs and told me to come see you.”  
  
Of course he did. Knowing him, he probably still hasn’t touched a scrap of food, too busy running himself into the ground to care about the fact that his body’s literally going to give out on him if he isn’t careful. I sigh and run a hand through my hair, flopping back against the pillows once it’s obvious that Castiel isn’t exactly up on the cultural significance of a handshake. “Not to be rude or ungrateful or anything, but why didn’t you have enough Angel… stuff to heal me all the way?”  
  
“Multiple factors. There’s more at work in the world right now than you could even begin to understand, Brendon.” I can see why Ryan mentioned not liking him back at HQ weeks ago. There’s a sort of loftiness to the way he speaks, something that might come off as condescension to someone with Ryan’s earthier personality but is probably closer to ethereal wisdom in reality. I go ahead and decide to give him the benefit of the doubt since he saved my life on nothing more than a request from Dean. He can’t be all bad. A little awkward, a little out of place… hell, we might have a decent amount of common ground. “Sam and Dean left their own battle to help you. They have their own ancient force of evil trying to eradicate all life on Earth, and on top of that, I’ve been leading a war effort in Heaven against the Archangel Raphael. Suffice to say, I’m stretched relatively thin at the moment.”  
  
“Wait, there’s a Civil War in Heaven? Doesn’t… um, doesn’t God have a problem with that?”  
  
Castiel does the weird head-tilt again. “God’s been missing for ages.”  
  
Oh. Well, that puts a damper on any spirituality I might have ever possessed.  
  
“And there’s also the fact that the blade Atiria stabbed you with was more powerful than I’d anticipated. Whatever it was, it’s got its own set of dark powers. The wound was so resistant to heal that I almost wasn’t able to restore you before your brain activity ceased and you were lost to us,” he goes on like he hasn’t just given me an existential crisis with the whole ‘effectively there is no God’ thing, walking over to my side of the bed and gesturing at the long red gash across my stomach. “I couldn’t heal you beyond the point of getting you out of mortal danger, at least not then. Your body wouldn’t have been able to handle the strain and you would have just died again. But now that you’ve had time to rest, I should be able to…”  
  
I don’t know what I was expecting, but the blue shimmery stuff that looks like something straight out of a Disney movie that gleams suddenly along the length of the wound definitely wasn’t on the list. It doesn’t really feel like much, a vague warmth and a slight tickle, but the pain ceases immediately in its wake, ebbing away until it feels like it was never there at all. I look down at my body and curse disbelievingly under my breath. What had been a raw, relatively fresh wound is now nothing more than a long scar, something that could be a year old or more. I run my fingers over the raised, gnarled tissue experimentally. Skin. That’s definitely skin. Whole, healed skin.  
  
I make a mental note to ask Dean where we can get our own on-call Angel.  
  
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that,” Castiel frowns contemplatively down at the healed wound, taking a step back and shaking a few stray blue sparks out of his hand. “Like I said, that blade was formidable. Evil that strong always leaves a mark. You’ll have that scar for the rest of your life. You’ll also need to rest for another week or so before returning to your previous standard of activity. Rushing you through recovery could have adverse effects since the weapon that harmed you was so powerful.”  
  
“Hey, I can deal with a scar and a few days off my feet. It’s a better option than dying,” I shrug, looking at the bloodstained towel and back to the puckered scar before turning back to Castiel with a vague smile. “Thanks for everything. You saved my life.”  
  
“I was aware of the prophecy,” he says simply, like that’s the answer to everything. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you, Brendon, but this isn’t over, this confrontation between you and Atiria. If anything, it’s only just begun.”  
  
My mouth goes dry. “What do you mean? If we can stop her from blowing open the gates of Hell, it’s all over, right?”  
  
“Wrong. Opening the gates is one way for Atiria to lay waste to the world. It’s far from the only way. Now that she’s been slighted, she’ll be thirsty for carnage. Her quest to burn the world to a crisp doesn’t stop with one failed plan. Are you even aware of Atiria’s history?”  
  
“Not exactly,” I say carefully, sitting up and wrapping my arms around my knees. There’s still pain when I move, but now it’s a dull, internal ache, like sore muscles after a long run. “She came out of Pandora’s Box, right?”  
  
Castiel shakes his head, hands in his pockets. “Atiria  _is_  Evil. She’s far more ancient than Pandora’s Box. She’s every bit as old as I am, maybe even as old as the Universe itself. She’s the Chaos that comes with Order, the Darkness that comes with Light. That Order and Light is an entity that the Greeks called Elpis, Atiria’s sister, effectively. There cannot be one without the other. Where one goes, the other follows, and that is their curse. Eternally pitted against one another, but unable to exist on their own.”  
  
My head hurts, and I get the vague idea that I should be taking notes. “So she didn’t come from the box?”  
  
“Not exactly, no.” Yeah, I should definitely be taking notes. I look around for Ryan’s journal, but I don’t see it anywhere and Castiel keeps rattling on before I have the chance to even find a scrap of paper. Great. “Atiria got embroiled with the old Greek gods long ago. Fearing her power, the gods created a prison strong enough to hold her. They sealed her away, and in doing so imprisoned Elpis as well, before casting the prison down to the mortal realm.”  
  
“So since they couldn’t kill her, they just made her the human race’s problem instead. Nice,” I scoff, feeling slightly sick. I’ve got something after me that fucking  _Zeus_  was scared of.  
  
“And of course, you’ve read the tale of Pandora. A foolish human girl opened the prison and unleashed Atiria upon the world, although Elpis remained to bestow benevolence upon the human race, worshipped as the spirit of hope,” Castiel sighs almost boredly, and it occurs to me that he probably watched all of this go down firsthand. The prospect of that is unreal, but it’s enough to keep my attention riveted on him, hanging on every word. “Atiria has been wreaking havoc since the day that box opened, but she’s always had loftier aspirations. She  _wants_  to get back to the cosmos. If given the chance, she’ll destroy the world and then move onto other realms. Hell, Heaven, it doesn’t matter. She won’t stop until everything in Creation is smoke and ash. The Oracle of Delphi foresaw this fate, but she also foresaw the potential salvation of the Universe. You. It falls to you to stop her once and for all.”  
  
“But what does any of that have to do with me?!” I croak, panic constricting around my throat like a noose. Every time I think this is over, the tunnel just gets a little deeper and darker. “I’m just some kid with a certain bloodline, big deal! I’m potential energy! Once the window of opportunity for her to use me closes, I’m nothing. Why is it up to me to stop her? That seems a little above my pay grade, man, I haven’t even been hunting for a month!”  
  
It’s either pity or empathy that Castiel fixes me with when he looks at me, but I can’t tell exactly which one it is, which one I want it to be. “Your sacred blood is more than a window of opportunity, Brendon. But you’re right, you are potential energy. There’s power in you that you haven’t even begun to access yet. When the time comes, that power will be enough for you to fulfill your role in all of this.”  
  
“What does that even  _mean?!_ ” I practically wail, clutching at my hair and feeling hideously like I’m about to burst into tears. “I don’t have any powers! I’m not special, I’m not -”  
  
“Cas, beat it. You’re upsettin’ him.” The snappy drawl of Ryan’s voice feels almost like a balm on my frantic mind, smoothing over the desperation long enough for me to dig my nails into the rapidly receding spiral of reality and hold on. He ducks into the room and fixes Castiel with a glare that could probably drop an elephant at ten paces, his grip tightening on a tray piled high with food that I guess he must have brought up from the kitchen. “You were the one yappin’ on about how he needed to take it easy. Dean wants you downstairs. Scram.”  
  
Castiel frowns at him for a second, but then some sort of shift happens. A rush of a breeze even though the window’s closed, a faint rustling sound, and then he’s gone in the blink of an eye, leaving me gaping in confusion and Ryan standing at the foot of the bed, scowling. “Big ol’ feathery asshat. Got half a mind to choke him out with his own goddamn halo.”  
  
He looks ten times better, a clean undershirt clinging to his bony shoulders and a pair of gray sweatpants settled low across his hips. He smirks as he leans over to set the tray of food down on my lap, sandwiches and chips and two bottles of beer. I resist the urge to kiss him again, and it’s damn hard when he’s so close, smelling like soap and Old Spice and everything good in the world. He’s shaved over the course of the last half hour, and his hair is still wet, drying in damp curls around his ears. Exhaustion still clings to his movements, but he doesn’t look like the walking dead anymore, and that much is a mercy. The late afternoon light outside casts shadows across the visible scars crisscrossing Ryan’s skin as he sighs and flops down on the bed next to me. I stare at them more intently than I should, reach out before I can stop myself to brush my fingers over the circular echo of a bullet wound nestled between his shoulder and collarbone. “How did this one happen?”  
  
He laughs. “Spencer shot me.”  
  
“What?!”  
  
“Yeah, we were fuckin’ around in this old warehouse while our dads were workin’ a case. I was about fifteen, I think, maybe sixteen. Either way, I was a stupid teenager, thought it’d be funny to jump out from behind some boxes and scare the piss outta him. Didn’t know that his dad had given him a nine millimeter that mornin’ before they left, and he freaked out, popped me right in the shoulder. Had to pull it out and dress it by myself with some tweezers and half a bottle of whiskey, ‘cause my old man would’ve skinned me alive if he knew I’d been messin’ around on the job. It’s one of my happier injuries.” The grin on Ryan’s face fades as he reaches out to touch the remnants of the ragged wound on my stomach, the pads of spindly fingers traversing the dips and rises in the puckered scar tissue. “I guess I did tell you that you’d end up with your own collection.”  
  
“It’s pretty wicked for a starter, I think,” I smirk at him, sitting the tray down on the mattress so I can maneuver enough to shift closer to him. “Battle scars are sexy.”  
  
“Not when you got as many of ‘em as I do,” he rolls his eyes, stretching the fabric of his undershirt over his hand and using it to twist the top off one of the beer bottles before handing it to me. “D’you know how much I had to pay Dean to go find somewhere that sold Heineken? You’re lucky I like you.”  
  
“Do you really? I mean, I wasn’t really sure,” I laugh, which makes him laugh, which somehow leads to us kissing again, and all of the sudden I’ve forgotten what I was laughing about. Somewhere in the haze my beer ends up being set down hurriedly on the nightstand and then it’s all him, all Ryan with his sharp angles and intoxicating taste and his damp hair slipping through my fingers. He murmurs something against my lips and I don’t quite catch it, but it sounds vaguely like  _Mine_. A flash of heat kindles under my skin and I moan into his mouth, drawing his bottom lip between my teeth and tugging insistently at his hair. We’ve got lost time to make up for. So much lost time.  
  
“Hey, this don’t constitute takin’ it easy,” Ryan pants, disconnecting our lips and exhaling shakily, his thumb brushing over my bottom lip sadly, like he wishes he could ignore the fact that I’m on supposed bedrest. I wish I could ignore it too, but the steadily rising ache in my torso reminds me that overdoing it isn’t the best idea.  
  
I sigh and roll back onto the mattress, grabbing one of the sandwiches from the tray and munching on it more viciously than I mean to. I guess I was hungrier than I thought. “PB &J, chips, and beer. We’re eating like college students.”  
  
“Best I could do. I’m a good cook, but there wasn’t much food downstairs and the Cowboys game is on in five.” The TV clicks on and Ryan grabs a sandwich for himself, flicking through channels until he lands on ESPN. There’s still a faint, leaden feeling in the pit of my stomach, left there in a lingering sense of foreboding after what Castiel told me. I know this isn’t over. Somehow, I’ve always known. But for now, I just want to ignore the absolute shitshow happening beyond the end of this bed, focus on something that’s stable and secure for once in my life. Ryan doesn’t object when I curl up beside him, and despite the fact that we were just making out like high schoolers, it still manages to shock me when he actually stretches and wraps his arm around me instead of shrinking in the opposite direction. Something in him has changed. Something in  _us_  has changed.  
  
“So…” I start haltingly, my head on his chest, fingers tracing nonsensical patterns along the scars above the neckline of his undershirt. “This is new.”  
  
“It is,” Ryan nods, putting the TV on mute and playing absently with my hair, his breaths deep and even. He seems content. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him content before. “Very new.”  
  
“Full disclosure, I’ve wanted this for a while.”  
  
“Me too. I just didn’t realize it until back there in the graveyard.”  
  
“I…” In a moment’s time, I lose what it was that I was trying to say. It’s a struggle to articulate it, whether the cause of that struggle is my own confusion or the steady beat of Ryan’s heart under my ear clogging up my thought process. “What is… this? What are we? Us? Is us a thing?”  
  
Ryan sighs heavily, rolling over onto his side and staring me down with more intensity than he probably means to. It makes me feel bare, vulnerable, like everything I am is on display. All my chips are on the table, and there’s something about that fact that’s more scary than liberating. Ryan’s holding all the cards here, and whatever words he chooses next could make or break everything. The longer his silence lasts, the more I start to think that I should have left a good thing alone and never asked at all. If the way he’s acted ever since I met him is any indicator, I might have pressed him too far. And when that happens, he shuts down. I don’t want that again, don’t want him to be behind his walls where I can’t reach him. The gates are open just a crack now, and I’m terrified that he’ll balk and slam them shut before I’ve got the chance to get inside.  
  
“Don’t ask me to explain how I feel, Brendon. You know I’m absolute shit at doin’ that sorta thing.” He doesn’t sound angry. Just tired. Contemplatively, he reaches out and smooths my bed-rumpled hair back into place. “I knew that there were certain things about you that I noticed from the very start. I knew that you were beautiful and smart and a little shit in the absolute best sorta way, but I didn’t let myself think about it. Couldn’t afford to. But you just kinda pulled me in, y’know? I didn’t want you to. I don’t know how you did it. All I know is that when I thought you were gone back there, my whole fuckin’ world caved in. I don’t know what that means, and I ain’t gonna try to analyze it. You’re here now, and you’re okay, and that’s a miracle as far as I’m concerned. Like hell I’m gonna waste my second chance at this… whatever this is. That’s my explanation. Take it or leave it.”  
  
There’s something he hasn’t said. I can feel it settled heavily underneath his skin, feel it pressing outwards against his ribs even after he lays back down and I’m in his arms again, perching my chin on his sternum and looking up at him. “Why are you so afraid of being with me?”  
  
Because that’s what it is. Fear. That was what made him pull away every time I tried to get close, what built his walls so high that practically nothing can get over them. Ryan is so scared of being with me that it took me nearly dying to make him wake up to the fact that it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. The proverb about how it’s better to have loved and lost doesn’t apply when you’ve only loved from afar.  
  
“I’m so fuckin’  _tired_  of losin’ people I care about, Bren,” he whispers, and something about him looks so broken that it makes me physically ache, a nameless longing to pick up all those shattered pieces behind his eyes and put them back together. “I lost everyone I’ve ever loved. My family, Z, Spencer. Most of the time, it feels like everything I touch dies, and I just… That’s what I was scared of. I thought you were safe as long as I didn’t get too close to you, but I was wrong about that on about ten different levels. I’m still scared. Fuck, if you knew how  _terrified_ … It eats me alive. I don’t wanna lose you. I  _can’t_  lose you.”  
  
“I think it’s a safe bet to say that if I came back from the brink of death for you, I’m going to be a little harder to get rid of than your average guy,” I laugh sleepily, lacing my fingers up into tangled knots with his long, spindly ones.  
  
“For me?”  
  
“Yeah, dumbass, for you.” My time in the world of consciousness has taken its toll, sleep eating at the edges of my vision. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but Ryan looks almost like he could be happy. “Not much else worth running away from the Empress of Evil for.”  
  
“I’m not lettin’ anything hurt you again.” Solid. Positive. It’s a fact. I believe him.  
  
“I know,” I mumble, curled into his heartbeat and half-delirious with sleep as the impending sunset lights up the room in shades of gold. “Prophecy says so, remember? You’re the legendary ass-kicking warrior.”  
  
“Done a pretty shitty job of it.”  
  
Sighing, my eyes drift shut, consciousness closing in around the feeling of bony fingers tiptoeing down my spine. “You’re a hero, Ry. You don’t see it, but I do. You’re my hero.”  
  
He says something, but I lose it in the depths of the slumber that rises up to swallow me.

* * *

It’s pitch dark outside when I’m woken up by RUSH’s ‘Fly By Night’ blaring right in my ear. Ryan and I both flail out of sleep, me mumbling incoherently and him cursing as he paws around on the nightstand and comes up with his phone, squinting down at the caller ID.  
  
“Patrick. I’ll put him on speaker, hold on.” Ryan fiddles around with the phone for a bit, tapping at the screen arbitrarily. “You ever hear of callin’ at a decent hour, Stump?”  
  
 _“Ryan! Ryan, listen to me!”_  Patrick sounds absolutely terrified, his breathing ragged in the speaker and his voice ratcheted up a half octave. _“Don’t use the Colt! It won’t work! I did some research and I’m telling you, the rabbit hole on this thing goes too deep to risk the jump!”_  
  
“Yeah, we figured out the Colt thing the hard way. Things got a bit nasty, but it’s all good now. What are you freakin’ out about?” Ryan’s fully awake now, sitting up in bed and holding the phone in his outstretched palm. “What’s goin’ on, are y’all okay?”  
  
 _“Listen very carefully, okay?! You and the Winchesters need to get Brendon off the radar. I mean,_ off _the radar. Get him as deep underground as you can. If you can hide him past Winter Solstice, then Atiria’s plan is undermined. That’s when she needs to do the sacrifice.”_  There’s some sort of scuffling in the background on Patrick’s end, but it’s impossible to make out what it is. All that I can decipher is the tension in his words, the terror lurking underneath.  _“There’s no fighting anymore, Ryan, just running. She literally can’t be killed. There’s only one thing in the world that can even slow her down, and -”_  
  
A massive crash rattles through the phone, the sound of utter carnage erupting on the other end of the line. It sounds like a hurricane just blew in through the door, the sound of heavy objects hitting walls and furniture sliding across the floor. Through the chaos, Pete’s voice is just barely audible, a frantic, desperate  _“Go! Pat, go!”_  
  
“Patrick?!” The only response Ryan gets is more rattling, the sound of running footfalls and a slamming door. “Patrick, what the fuck was that?!”  
  
Miles away, Patrick is breathing heavily into his cell phone, sobs hitching in his throat. _“I… I’m so sorry, Ry. I tracked down as much as I could, but it wasn’t enough. Hide Brendon. Hide yourself. That’s all you can do at this point. I’m so sorry, I -”_  
  
A door opening. The plasticine clatter of Patrick’s phone falling to the floor. The most awful, horrified scream I’ve ever heard. A wet, sickening gurgle. Silence.  
  
The line goes dead.


	13. Chapter 12 - Ryan

 

I’ve hit that level of exhaustion where the world takes on a weird, hazy quality, but every time I see spots of bright color in front of my eyes and my lids grow heavy, it only makes me gun the engine a little more. All told, the little nap I took with Brendon only lasted about five hours, and the stress I’ve been under since I woke up has eaten away every second of that sleep and then some.  
  
It feels weird, driving the Mustang with no one sitting in the passenger’s seat. It shouldn’t feel so odd and out-of-place, not when I drove alone for four years and that’s only changed here in the past month or so, but that’s what Brendon does to people. He creeps up on you, makes you need him for a long time before you ever realize that you do, leaves a cold emptiness in his absence that you can’t even identify until he’s long gone.  
  
I left him back in Wyoming. Of course I did. He wasn’t nearly strong enough to travel, and dragging him into the proverbial hurricane of shit that’s probably waiting for me in Chicago was the definition of a bad idea. I tried to tell him that, tried to convince him that he’d do more harm than good outside the small safe-haven we’d made for him, but it didn’t sink in. Our quiet argument escalated to a yelling match within minutes, and eventually ended with Cas using his Angel mojo to knock Brendon out while I explained what had happened during Patrick’s phone call to Dean and Sam, packing as I talked and trying to ignore the way Brendon still looked betrayed even in his sleep.  
  
When I kissed him goodbye, he was still unconscious, lips pale and unresponsive. As I walked outside and started the car, I couldn’t help but think that my life has a definite pattern to it - little spots of brightness followed by tidal waves of disaster.  
  
Thirteen hours, four rest stops, and two packs of cigarettes later, and that image is still burned into my mind, Brendon’s dark hair a stark contrast to the white pillows and his fluttering eyelids holding more accusation in them than any vicious glare he’s ever given me. For a few minutes, for one golden stitch in time, we had something, and here I’ve gone and shot it all to hell. When and more importantly  _if_  I get back, he’ll never trust me again.  
  
But there was no way I ever could’ve made him understand. Even Dean and Sam didn’t get it, what drove me to go to Chicago just to witness the inevitable truth. Pete and Patrick were the closest thing I had to a family for years, and just sitting in Wyoming after that phone call was unthinkable. If there was anything, even a chance… Dean just shook his head as I rambled, knowing that he couldn’t stop me. So there I went on a fourteen-hour marathon drive with next to no sleep and no real idea what I was going to do once I reached my destination. Go ahead and tack on another bullet-point to The Compendium of Stupid Shit Ryan Ross Has Done In His Lifetime.  
  
I’m about an hour and a half over the Illinois border when I stop at a 7-11, filling up my gas tank and ignoring the glares I get from people for using my cell phone at the pump. It’s a long list of quick calls, back-to-back with no time spared for chatting. First a call to Dean to check on Brendon. I hang up when I hear a muddle of infuriated shouting and  _“Ryan, you stupid motherfucker! When you get back here I’m going to...”_  in the background. Brendon’s pissed off and yelling, so that must mean he’s back to his old self. Then a call to both Pete and Patrick’s cell phones, the fourth time I’ve done it, the same long stretch of rings followed by their voicemails. I know better than to think I’m expecting a different result. At this point, I’m just doing it to hear their voices. A shaky breath, shaky hands screwing on my gas cap, shaky steps over to the splinter-ridden picnic table out in front of the store as I go down my contacts list to check who’s still alive. Jon, Andy and Joe, William and his crew, Dan Keyes and his guys out in LA, everyone that I call picks up and reassures me that everything’s fine. Jon’s the only one who asks what’s wrong and I curse under my breath, a drag of my cigarette getting caught in my throat. I forgot that he’s got a certain way of knowing things just by listening to you talk. Might have something to do with the fact that his grandmother was one of the most powerful psychics in the Midwest.  
  
“Nothin’. Had a situation in Wyoming that shook me up a little bit, just wanted to check in on everyone. Bye, Jon.” I jab at the ‘end’ button on my screen before Jon can get a word edgewise, scrolling through my contacts again. I heave a sigh, click the name and try to figure out how to put a smile in my voice when I feel like screaming. Jon might have a certain intuition, but he’s got nothing on this. Ring. Ring. Ring.  
  
“Please don’t go to voicemail,” I whisper, starting to feel scared.  
  
Ring. Ring.  _“Hey, Ry!”_  
  
“Keltie, thank God.” My knees buckle and I collapse onto the bench, the picnic table’s old wood groaning beneath the sudden onslaught of weight. The tremors in my hand are visible when I reach up to rub at the side of my face, grip tightening on the plastic casing of my phone until I’m almost certain I hear it crack a bit. “Are you okay?”  
  
 _“Yeah, but you sure ain’t. You sound like you been run over by a Mack truck.”_  Keltie’s got one of those really expensive smartphones, and the fidelity of the microphone in it is so high that I can hear what she’s doing on the other end of the line, a refrigerator door opening and closing, a sink running, the rustle of thick paper that might be a bag of dog food. She’s at home.  _“What’s goin’ on? Did something happen with Spence?”_  
  
“No. Yes. No, I mean… I mean I ain’t found nothin’ as far as Spencer goes, but…” the fatigue is starting to get to me, eating at what little eloquence I’ve ever had until I’m borderline-incoherent. “Listen, Kelts, some big stuff’s happenin’ up here, and you might be in trouble.”  
  
 _“Okay. Tell me what I need to do.”_  And that’s it. No crying, no hysteria, no panic. Just a calm acceptance of the facts and a realization that they have to be dealt with. Christ, why can’t all civilians act like the ones in Summerdale? But then again, Keltie’s not exactly a civilian. Her mother was one of the best hunters Summerdale had ever seen, got out of the business because she didn’t want that life for her family. But Keltie still learned how to defend herself, still grew up playing with Spencer and I. I’ve seen her shoot a beer can off a fence post with a handgun at thirty yards. I wouldn’t want her mad at me. She’s tougher than that big smile and bottle-blonde hair let on.  
  
“All right, get something to write with, it’s a long list,” I reply, grinding my cigarette out on the edge of the table and glaring at the old lady filling up her tan Cadillac who’s staring at me, scowling at her until she looks away. I wait until I hear the shuffle of paper on Keltie’s end of the line, sigh into the mouthpiece. “First things first, you’re gonna go over to my house. There’s a big cabinet full of herbs and shit down in the cellar, and you’re gonna need to make yourself a hex bag. You need two bones from a chicken’s foot, an unbroken spider egg, a sprig of lavender, some hemp, and a pinch of goofer dust. Pretty sure Spence kept all that in stock except for the eggs, but there’ll be enough spiderwebs in that cellar that you can find one. After you make the hex bag, go upstairs to the study. On the third shelf behind the desk there’ll be a big red leather-bound book about Enochian sigils. You gettin’ all of this?”  
  
 _“Yeah, got it. Advanced protection hex bag - that’s Dean Winchester’s recipe, ain’t it? - red book on Enochian sigils. What next?”_  
  
“Bless your little pea-pickin’ heart, you’re handlin’ this like a champ,” I mumble in relief, thankful that she’s not reacting to this like any normal human being would. Keltie Colleen might be ten shades of crazy, but never let it be said that she’s not good in a crisis. “Take the book and go back to your house, paint every single sigil that’s in the protection and defense chapter on your walls. Use tonight to make your arrangements. Call off work indefinitely and find somewhere to stay, I don’t care if it’s a hotel or a friend’s house, hell, go up to your grandma’s place in Toronto for a few weeks. But by tomorrow mornin’, I want you to take Hobo and get the hell outta Summerdale, y’hear?”  
  
Keltie’s frowning. I can practically hear it through the phone.  _“Okay. Gran’s been on me to come up for months anyway, but why am I just packin’ up and flyin’ the coop? Angelic protection, heavy-duty hex bags that you use to throw off demons… what on God’s green earth’re you messin’ with, Ryan?”_  
  
“God ain’t got a damn thing to do with what might be comin’ your way, Kelts.” It comes out much more gravely than I mean it to, and I can feel how the words hit home, evident in her stunned silence. “Suffice to say it’s way bigger than anything I ever dealt with. Ain’t no way I can beat it, can’t even slow it down. All I can do is put my head down and keep a low profile, but this thing’s been goin’ after other people I care about. I don’t want you gettin’ hurt, so please, just humor me and get out of town for a while.”  
  
She wants to ask for a better explanation. I know she does, because if someone had given me that sort of vague write-off in the process of asking me to pack up my whole life in one night, I’d be pissed as all hell. But God love her, she doesn’t, just sighs into the receiver and walks across the linoleum of her kitchen in what sounds like high heels.  _“Okay. I’m on my way over there now. I’ll call you if I can’t find something.”_  
  
“You’re a star. Keep me posted, all right? And Keltie?” I can’t really figure out what to say, how to fill the expectant pause she gives me, so I settle for a mumbled “Take care.”  
  
 _“You too, Ry. I don’t know just what it is that you got yourself into, but don’t do nothin’ to get yourself killed.”_  
  
“I’ll try. Bye, Kelts.” Heavy. I feel heavy. Too heavy to move, curled up in front of a rundown gas station in the middle of Nowhere, Illinois with my world crashing down around me. Brendon asked me the night I met him how I got up in the morning, what kept me going. At the time, I told him that you keep going because it’s your only option. Now, I’m starting to ponder the validity of that statement. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an option for me to just sit here and shut everything else out, let that weight settling at the core of me grow and grow until I sink right down through the concrete and into the center of the Earth. Going on in all of this, all of this death and pain and fear… it’s impossible.  
  
I sit for five minutes, ten, smoke my way through the last two cigarettes in my pack. I don’t sink into the ground. Fifteen minutes. I drag myself to my feet and shuffle towards the smudged glass door of the 7-11.  
  
You keep going because it’s your only option.

 

* * *

I end up pulling out of the gas station with a plastic bag in my front seat that represents the end of all the cash I had with me - three cans of Red Bull, a new pack of smokes, and a pre-paid cell phone that I activate as I’m driving down the empty expanse of the highway. Only after me practically shotgunning the first two energy drinks does the fatigue become more manageable, my vision going back to normal and my senses more sharp, but there’s a whole other set of issues for me to deal with that start simmering under the surface with every mile closer to Chicago I get. Every mile marker hits me with a razored edge, gives me a horrible stabbing sensation in my gut that I can’t get rid of. I try to ignore it by turning the stereo up as far as it goes and flooring the gas pedal, thirty miles over the limit, forty, forty-five.  
  
All the good it does me is my engine grumbling irritably and a cop flashing his lights at me somewhere near a rest stop. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Sam made a very good case for me staying in Wyoming, citing the fact that whatever had cut off Patrick’s phone call could very well still be waiting for me in Chicago. I told him that I didn’t care, loading up the Mustang with every scrap of ammunition I could lay my hands on and driving off into the sunrise with more loyalty than sense. I still don’t care. Really, I don’t. I gave up on giving a damn about what happens to me years ago. But a few times along the road, I think of Brendon, think of his stupid smiles and his pretty eyes and the way his lips felt on mine. Those are the moments when something almost makes me turn the car around and speed all the way back to Cheyenne. I always knew deep-down that Brendon was trouble as far as my own stability was concerned, but I never saw this coming. I never thought he would make me more selfish than I already am.  
  
Passing the first exit sign for Chicago cements my resolve, though, makes it feel like I’ve gone too far to back down now. That sick feeling churns in my stomach even more violently as I flick my blinker signal on and peel off the highway a few more miles down, driving through Chicago on autopilot. The traffic isn’t too bad for eight o’clock at night on a Friday, the streets relatively clear as I navigate through sprawling blocks of residential area. I almost make the turn down Pete and Patrick’s street but swerve away at the last second, some kid in a blue Subaru laying on his horn after I almost take the front end off his car. Think, Ross.  _Think._  If the worst-case scenario is true and everything blows up, the neighbors are going to remember a big-ass red Mustang sitting in the driveway. I almost did that thing where I let my emotional turmoil take precedence over my training again, and I curse quietly as I drive down another three blocks and park in the lot of a little family-owned grocery store.  
  
I sit there for I don’t know how long, collecting both my thoughs and the things I need to take with me, the prepaid phone in my left pocket, my gun in my waistband, a silver knife in my boot. The grocery store will be closing soon, and my car will get towed if I’m not back by then. That fact still isn’t enough to make me get out of the car. The second my foot hits the pavement, all of this becomes real, and I’m not quite ready for that yet. I sigh and pull out my real cell phone, the one that’s all worn-out and battle-scarred from being dropped so much, swiping the screen to life.  
  
My thumb hovers uncertainly over my text messages, a whole long list of ones sent to Brendon that he hasn’t replied to.  
  
 _I don’t know when you’ll wake up to see this, but I’m sorry. I’ll be back soon.  
  
Are you up yet?  
  
I know you’re awake. I heard you on the phone. Talk to me.  
  
Bren. I’m sorry. Say something.  
  
I’m at a rest stop. Call me.  
  
BRENDON. Stop acting like a five year old. This is hard enough._  
  
The silent treatment is immaturity personified, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have the desired effect. I sit there in the dark parking lot thinking about what’s waiting for me a few blocks over, about the possibility of me not making it out of that house. I think about what I would say if I knew the words could be my last, and my mind gives me nothing but a long stretch of silence. Finally, I sigh and punch up a new text message, hitting the ‘send’ button with an odd sort of finality.  
  
 _Made it to Chicago. Getting ready to go to HQ. I’m sorry._  
  
It feels like there’s some vicious, clawed animal mauling the lining of my throat, choking off my breath as I pull the keys out of the ignition. I’m so startled by my phone buzzing that I almost jump out of my seat, grabbing it off the dashboard and looking, surprised, down at the little blinking notification of a new message from Brendon Urie.  
  
 _You’re an asshole and an idiot. I’m still mad at you. Please be careful._  
  
The motion of the vague smile that pulls at the corner of my lips is so far out of place in the situation at hand that it should make me feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t. I’m in the process of typing up a reply when my phone vibrates in my hand again, another little chat bubble popping up in the thread of messages.  
  
 _Come back to me._  
  
There’s no possible way I could ever come up with a reply for that. I lock my phone and shove it into the inside pocket of my jacket, popping my door open. “Goddammit, Brendon.”  
  
He makes me selfish. But he also makes me brave.  
  
I stick to back yards and side streets along my way, staying well out of the range of streetlights and security cameras. When I get to the corner, I don’t even approach HQ by way of the front door, opting instead to hop someone’s fence and drop down into the back yard. The back door is locked. Of course it is. Cursing under my breath, I fumble my keychain out of my pocket, clinking through the bits of metal until I find one that fits in the door. Pete gave it to me last year after I went outside to get the paper and ended up locked out on the porch in my boxers in the middle of January. Who would have thought that it would come in handy one day?  
  
The door swings open into the silence of the garage, Pete’s Prius sitting there, the engine still and cold. I can hear the furnace humming in the background, the hot water heater kicking on upstairs, but no footsteps, no voices. I feel like I’m going to throw up. My steps toward the door are careful and quiet, my sleeve pulled down over my hand as I twist the knob - no fingerprints. My DNA is all over this place, but so is Brendon’s, so is Andy’s, Joe’s, William’s, a plethora of other people’s. No point in making anyone’s job easier. I’ve finally shut myself down emotionally to the point that I can think four or five steps ahead, go ahead and cover my tracks if outside forces are going to get involved. But maybe they won’t. God, I hope they won’t. I hope that this all was a huge misunderstanding and that Pete and Patrick are upstairs watching TV right now, will greet me with surprised smiles and a drink when I walk in. I hope. But hope has never been kind to me, and it’s got no reason to start now. I grit my teeth, push the door open to the dark downstairs hallway while my free hand hovers over the grip of my gun. “Guys?”  
  
The smell of blood is so thick and overwhelming that it makes me gag, gripping onto the doorframe for support and practically doubling over in an effort to not lose what little I’ve eaten over the past twenty-four hours. That’s it. Any hope I might have had is gone now, a horrible ache rising in my chest. For the millionth time, it’s nothing but death and carnage and me left behind to pick up the pieces. My gun feels heavier than usual in my hand, everything in me weighed down by the knowledge of just what it is that I have to do now. A hunter’s funeral is out of the question. I can’t burn two bodies in the middle of Chicago without someone noticing. I can’t just leave HQ the way it is, either. There are things here that can’t be lost, information and artifacts that are too precious to be left unguarded, not to mention that leaving them here where any civilian could find them would prove disastrous.  
  
I have to do the opposite of my job. I have to take a paranormal event and dress it up to look like a normal murder.  
  
The door of the library is practically blown off its hinges, the wood clinging to its rightful place by a few splinters. I want to turn around and run as far as my feet will carry me. I want to let someone else do this, call Jon or William and beg them to be stronger than I am. Standing beside the door with gritted teeth and an aching heart, I let my hand drift towards my phone before pulling it away. This is my mess. This happened because of me. It’s my job to handle it.  
  
I owe them that much.  
  
The library is a mess, shelves overturned and furniture laying in broken ruins. It looks like a tornado came through, the glass in a few of the display cases blown out, books blown clear across the room from their original places. There’s so much debris to wade through that it takes a moment to notice the bright-red spatter against the back wall.  
  
Patrick never stood a chance. He was cornered, he was unarmed, and he was scared. I can still see that fear frozen on his face, present in the blank stare of his sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling overhead. My head can fill in the events on the other side of that phone call now, standing here in the aftermath. He ran into the library, locked the door behind him, hid behind the desk. Atiria - it had to have been her, fresh off a crippling defeat and looking for someone to take it out on - busted in like it was nothing, threw some furniture around for cinematic effect, found Patrick huddled in the corner. He dropped his phone, and it’s still on the hardwood a few feet away. He screamed. And then she ripped his throat out.  
  
There’s a massive pool of blood surrounding him, staining the fabric of his cardigan an ugly, rusty color and congealed in the crevices of the floorboards. I don’t know why I’m not freaking out, at least not externally. Inside, I’m a mess, but there’s something in my mind that won’t let me collapse the way my psyche is telling me to, won’t let me break down. Fresh flames of grief are licking along the linings of my veins with every heartbeat, but I can’t let it out. I should be collapsing to a ball on the floor and sobbing. Instead, I just stand there blankly, looking at Patrick’s body and coming to the awful realization that it can’t stay down here. If there are going to be civilians - especially cops - roaming around the house, they can’t come in the library. Too many things down here that would raise eyebrows, too much information that the public can’t know. There’s a sliding bookshelf out in the hallway that was custom-made to seal the door off from view in such an event, but the room will have to be cleared before I can do anything. That means dragging Patrick’s body out of here and somehow managing to make it look like he hasn’t been moved.  
  
Keep going, Ryan. Just put your head down and soldier through it. Forget the screams clawing their way up your throat and how it feels like you’re falling apart inside. There’s too much work to be done, no time to break now.  
  
I rake a shaking hand through my hair, trying to regain enough of a grip on reality to assess the situation. Blood congeals post-mortem, but there’s so much of it here that any attempt to just grab Patrick under the arms and haul him out would leave an incriminating trail that I wouldn’t be able to scrub out of the carpeted floor outside the library. What do I do? Think.  _Think,_  you idiot, it’s all you’re good for. My best option is one where I don’t have to touch anything. My fingerprints aren’t on file anywhere, but I’m not exactly inclined to leave them laying around. Something that could keep blood off the floors and my hands off the evidence…  
  
Bedsheets. There’s extra ones in the linen closet upstairs. I can take them with me when I leave, and no one will ever be the wiser.  
  
Trying to remember how to breathe, I duck out of the library and run upstairs. That’s where I find Pete, or at least what’s left of him. It’s more of a gory horror show on the living room carpet, and I don’t look at it for too long, fighting the metallic taste of impending sickness clinging to the backs of my teeth. I tell myself with every step that the bloody things lying on the floor aren’t Pete and Patrick. Not really. They’re just empty shells. Pete and Patrick are gone.  
  
 _Gone._  
  
The word sinks into my bones with a real, physical force, bringing me to my knees as soon as I walk through the doorway into the guest room. Each breath rattles through my lungs with a choked, scraping sound, my fingers clawing into the carpet in some futile effort to hold on to my sanity. They’re gone. Patrick with his easy smiles and the answer to every question. Pete, who was always a phone call away when I needed someone, who always kept a bed open for me no matter how much I swore I had never been one for staying in the same place for too long. They’re both gone, and it’s because of me, because I had to drag them into my mess and give them a front row seat to the end of the world. Two more names on the list of dead bodies I’m responsible for. Thirty seconds pass, a minute, and I’m sure I’ve lost it, sure that the meltdown is coming and I’m just going to have to ride it out.  
  
Dad always used to tell me to imagine a switch inside of me, one that controlled my basest human instincts - fear, empathy, affection, loss. The key to being a good hunter was learning to turn that switch on and off to suit your needs. I’m pretty sure he fucked up somewhere along the way, though, got his switch stuck in the ‘off’ position, and so I never put much stock in the theory. After all, it didn’t save him. Still, I’m so desperate that I scramble for it now, my throat burning with unshed tears and a hand pressed to the center of my chest like it could stop the vicious ache there. Just turn it off, turn it off, turn it -  
  
 _Click._  
  
Truth be told, it’s probably just emotional overload, me going into psychological shock. But whatever the reasoning, that internal switch finally flips. I stop being myself and turn into some sort of machine, finding my feet again and reaching for the closet, an itemized list of tasks already forming in my head.  
  
My switch stays off as I go robotically through the steps it will take to cover this up. Go to the bathroom, find a pair of long yellow cleaning gloves in the cabinet, pull them on. Back to the guest room, layer three sheets together so they’re more absorbent, take them back downstairs. Roll Patrick’s body into a makeshift bundle and haul all one hundred-something pounds of dead weight up to the living room, gently, gently, post-mortem bruising shows up on an autopsy and they can’t know he was moved. Lay the body (it’s not Patrick, not anymore, remember that) a few feet away from Pete’s, reason mechanically that there’s so much blood on the carpet that no one will question whether it’s from both of them.  
  
Breathe in. Breathe out. The worst part’s over. “I’m so sorry, guys.”  
  
They don’t say anything. Of course they don’t. Corpses don’t care too much for apologies.  
  
I try to ignore how badly I’m shaking as I fold up the sheets and go back through the open door of Pete’s office, throwing all my weight against that emotional switch to keep it turned off. There isn’t too much that would appear strange in here, but I take anything possibly incriminating and shove it in my bag. The laminated map with everyone’s names on it. The small collection of paper case files Pete kept even after going electronic a few years ago, his proudest achievements tucked into little manila envelopes that will outlive him by far. His laptop, where all those other cases now reside. FBI phone. CDC phone. Miscellaneous profession phone. Personal phones one, two, and three, and the chargers for each all disappear into the depths of my backpack with sharp plastic rattles.  
  
My gloved fingers ghost over the edge of a framed picture on Pete’s desk, his toothy grin alongside Patrick’s genuine smile and my own lopsided smirk peering out at me from behind the glass. We went to one of those god-awful, campy, maritime-themed restaurants up in Maine two years ago while we were working on taking out a rogue crossroads demon. At the time the shutter clicked, I’d been grumbling about how this wasn’t  _real_  seafood, my sense of appreciation lessened by growing up on the Gulf Coast and watching my mother take trips to buy fish fresh off the docks in Fairhope once or twice a week. Pete had been laughing and calling me a snob, Patrick smiling good-naturedly along with him, and William had snapped the picture on a cheap disposable camera we’d bought to use on the case, testing the first frame on the film.  
  
For the briefest moment, my switch clicks back on. I lift the frame off the desk, tuck it carefully into the outside pocket of my backpack. They can drape everything else in crime scene tape and dust it all for prints, but not this. Not this memory. They can’t have it.  
  
I cough around something that might have grown into a sob, shutting down again because I’m a long way from being done. It’s back to the hallway again, pulling a bucket and a scrub brush and a handful of cleaning supplies out of the utility closet. Back downstairs, cleaning up the library, one hour, two hours sweeping up the broken glass and putting the furniture back in its rightful place, the debris going into a big industrial trash can from the garage that will stay down here until someone can get in to properly dispose of it. Three hours, four hours on my hands and knees, scrubbing the blood out of the floorboards, jeans ruined, shirt ruined, heart ruined. The stains just won’t come up. The skin between the top of the cleaning gloves and my rolled-up sleeves is bleach-spotted and stinging by the time I finally give up, dumping the contents of the bucket down the drain in the garage and walking back into the library, tossing it into the corner with a defeated thud.  
  
I don’t really see the point in trying to take anything out of the library. I can only take as much as I can haul in my backpack, anyway, and if the room’s going to be sealed off, I can leave everything the way it is now. In all reality, I could have hauled ass out of here and left the library the way it was, but something about that idea felt so wrong, like such an insult that something made me stay and do my best to get the place back in shape. This was Patrick’s place, always full of the smell of coffee and the quiet hum of his computer. It wouldn’t be right to leave it with broken glass and the coppery stench of blood.  
  
His fedora is sitting on the desk where he must have left it before everything happened, and there’s something so symbolic about the absence of blood on that stupid little hat that I actually let it choke me up for a moment, peeling my gloves off and picking it up gingerly. I’ll take it with me. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but for some irrational reason, I don’t want to leave it behind.  
  
Sighing, I sling my backpack over my shoulders and go to walk out into the hallway, a plastic glimmer catching my eye right before I do. Patrick’s phone. I forgot to pick it up while I was cleaning the floor. My overworked muscles groaning in protest, I lean over and pick it up, poking arbitrarily at the power button. Surprisingly, it’s still on. I don’t know why I do it, but I swipe past the lock screen, the factory default background lighting up the dim ambiance of the library. Maybe I’m expecting some sort of closure. Maybe I’m expecting to see some electronic log of what Patrick did with his final hours.  
  
I’m definitely not expecting to see a small icon of a folder in the bottom corner of the screen labeled ‘RYAN.’  
  
A confused frown works its way into my face as I poke at the little pixellated folder, a window popping up to tell me that the file is password protected. Well, shit. Figuring it’s something about the case, I go down through a list of related words, everything from ‘Atiria’ to ‘Brendon’ to ‘Apocalypse,’ but nothing works. I’m about ready to give up on the stupid thing until I remember the prank Pete and Patrick pulled on me last April Fool’s Day, changed all my passwords until I couldn’t use my laptop or anything. I sat in the living room bitching at them all day, getting increasingly mad as they kept telling me that I was making it harder than it actually was. When I finally figured it out, more out of frustration than anything else, I threw a half-full beer can at Pete’s head so hard that he was bruised for a week.  
  
“Patrick, you little shit,” I whisper to myself, typing the word ‘password’ into the window and watching as the folder finally opens up.  
  
It’s nothing. Just a little text file containing six words. ‘Third drawer on left, false bottom.’  
  
“The hell?” Clicking the phone off and shoving it in my pocket, I look around the library trying to figure out what that means. I’m so tired and heartsick that it takes me much longer than it should to notice the desk, three drawers on each side. The third drawer on the left is packed with broken tools of the trade, dull knives and rusted iron and snapped talismans. But the drawer itself is a little shallower than it should be, I notice after digging everything out. I feel around on the smooth wooden surface for a few seconds before my fingers press into a seam in the wood and the bottom of the drawer gives way with a high-pitched creak, swinging upwards.  
  
Inside is a thick folder of papers with a hex bag tied around it on a leather cord, a bright orange Post-it note bearing Patrick’s careful handwriting stuck to the front. ‘Good Luck.’  
  
He knew. Somehow, he knew it was going to come to this.  
  
I exhale shakily and shove the file into my backpack. I can read it later, when I’m actually capable of processing something other than the pain that’s slowly starting to spread through every fiber of me. I can’t keep my switch off much longer. I don’t even know if it will last me all the way back to Wyoming. I can’t walk through the streets like this, my clothes stained with blood and bleach, but I have a few extra shirts and pairs of jeans tucked into a drawer up in the guest room. Turning on my heel, I exit the library and do my best to pull the ruined door shut, flipping the mechanism on the bookshelf to the left. It’s like the false-bottomed drawer, shallower than it should be, with another bookcase concealed on a rolling track behind it. Once I pull it out and set it up, it looks like an uninterrupted wall of bookshelves, from the end of the hallway all the way up to the bottom of the stairs. When the false shelf slides into place, it feels like I’ve just sealed a tomb.  
  
The trip upstairs is more exhausting than running a four-minute mile, my eyes carefully averted to the bloody, posed ruination on the living room carpet as I duck back the hallway and into the guest room, sleeves pulled down over my hands again as I open up the dresser and pull all of my clothes out. My ruined ones get bundled up in the bloodstained sheets from earlier, a fresh shirt and pair of Wranglers pulled on and all the spare clothing going into my backpack. I feel like my body is made of lead, heavy and so, so tired, but the made-up bed is far from appealing. I want to get out of here, want to go back to Wyoming and Brendon. Some stupid, irrational part of me says that once I’m with him again, all of this will seem a little less awful.  
  
Backpack on my shoulders again, I walk carefully back to the living room, forcing myself to look at the carnage I created. I should get out now. I’ve done a decent cover-up job - we’re in a rough part of Chicago, and the cops were watching this place for a while a year or so ago, thinking all the traffic in and out might have meant it was a drug house. Two people dying bloody in here won’t be scrutinized too carefully, probably written off as some skirmish over drug money. It’s posed to look that way, but for some reason, I make the conscious decision to ruin all that, reaching forward carefully and sliding Pete and Patrick’s eyes shut, the pads of my fingers coming back red and sticky. “I’m sorry I dragged y’all into this. I don’t even know what you died for. You deserved better than that.”  
  
The laughter rises up behind me out of nowhere, a bubbling, dark alto that cuts through the stillness like a knife. “You actually showed up. How stupid  _are_  you?”  
  
Startled, I curse and whip around, tugging my gun out of my waistband and flicking the safety off in one fluid motion, not even sure of what I’m aiming for.  
  
“Oh, put your toys away, Ryan. We have grown-up things to discuss,” Atiria waves dismissively, standing at the edge of the pool of blood and looking calm as can be. Sierra’s clothes are completely soaked in red. The blood could be Brendon’s, Pete’s, Patrick’s, some mix of all three and God knows how many others. My gun stays trained on her even though I know it won’t do me any good, and she just laughs, eyes flashing bright viridian in the dim streetlight filtering in through the living room curtains. “You know, I have this theory about boys who wave their guns around like they have something to prove. Between your peashooter and that ridiculous car, you’re definitely compensating for something.”  
  
“You evil  _bitch_ ,” I hiss, hand tightening on the grip of my Beretta until my knuckles go white. “They didn’t have to die.”  
  
Atiria raises an eyebrow, nodding down at Pete and Patrick’s bodies. “Of course they did. They knew too much. Anyone with that kind of knowledge of the prophecy automatically goes to the top of my hit-list, kiddo. Nothing personal, just doing business.”  
  
“The prophecy’s  _over_ , Atiria. You done fucked up, missed your chance,” I lash back venomously. Everything revolves around her thinking that. I have to keep up the illusion if Brendon’s even got a snowball’s chance in hell. “There was nothin’ they knew that could’ve been a threat to you.”  
  
“It’s cute how you’re still trying to protect him,” she giggles, examining the blood caked under her nails. “But it’s time for some real talk. I know Brendon’s alive.”  
  
My guts drop. “He died. I sat there and held his body, don’t you  _dare_ -”  
  
“I know he died. But you managed to bring him back somehow. You’ve got him shielded, protected, sure. But I know that he’s alive.”  
  
I try to laugh it off, a crude bark of sound that explodes past my lips. “Yeah? How d’you figure?”  
  
“Because  _you’re_  still alive, numbnuts!” She shouts, eyes flashing, and the room shakes like it’s fallen victim to a passing earthquake. “Did you miss that crucial little detail of your prophecy crash course?! Your fates are one, and that means if you’re still kicking, then so is my precious little key. Don’t bullshit me, Ryan Ross. I’m the original bullshitter.”  
  
“Maybe you’re wrong.”  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
I swallow heavily, my lips pressing into a thin line. I don’t confirm, don’t deny, and don’t make any move towards lowering my gun. “So what, you did all this thinkin’ I’d tell you where he is? If that’s your angle, then I ain’t the stupid one here.”  
  
“No, my  _angle_  was multi-faceted, you blithering idiot,” Atiria seethes, pressing a hand to her forehead in exasperation like she’s trying to reason with a brick wall. “I come here, I take out your little friends and eliminate your source of assistance, I wait for you to come riding in on your red metal horse to save the day. If you show up, it means Brendon’s still alive. I now have the upper hand,  _and_  the knowledge that I don’t have to drop back eighty yards and punt on this whole Hell Gate fiasco. And you, like the good little soldier you are, played right into my hand. Again. I keep overestimating you, Ryan, telling myself that you couldn’t  _possibly_  be that stupid, and you just keep proving me wrong. If this is all the prophecy’s got to throw at me, then this won’t even be any fun.”  
  
That sick, sinking feeling pervades every cell of my body. All that I’ve done to keep Brendon safe, and I’ve only fucked it all up again. How many people have died for my attempt at keeping him hidden, all those lives in vain because I was stupid enough to come to Chicago to try to stop a tragedy that had already happened? I breathe out in a stutter, my gun arm finally falling limp at my side. Right now, it’s not Atiria I feel like putting a bullet in. “So what now?”  
  
“That’s your call,” she says simply, like that’s a real answer. “What do  _you_  think is my next step?”  
  
“If you’re smart, you’ll just kill me now,” I shrug, already accepting it. “I know I’m a shitty excuse for one, but I don’t think you want the Prophecy’s Hero runnin’ around loose when it starts gettin’ down to the wire. You gotta know that as long as I’m still breathin’, I’ll try to stop you. So you take me out now, you leave Brendon without a protector, you win. The end.”  
  
“Oh, you silly boy. I’m not going to kill you,” Atiria beams, and the look on her face is warm, almost inviting underneath all the bloodstains. She steps closer to me, but I don’t bother shooting her, only watching carefully as she walks right up into my personal space and presses a hand to my cheek. My skin crawls at the contact. “What a waste it would be. You obviously have no regard for your own life, so there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in just killing you. At this point, that might actually be doing you a favor. Watching you scrub your friends’ blood out of the floorboards, though?  _That’s_  poetic.”  
  
“You’re sick,” I whisper disbelievingly.  
  
“No, sweetheart, I’m  _Evil_. I don’t operate under the influence of human psychology.” Patting my cheek in a way that’s more of a slap, Atiria grins up at me even wider, tucking a strand of my hair back into place. “And like I said back at the cemetery, you’re no paragon of virtue yourself, Ryan. This doesn’t have to end badly for you. I look at you, and I see such  _potential_. All that hatred, all those years of suppressed anger. You could really be something if you just lived up to your true nature.”  
  
My jaw clenches. “I’m not like you -”  
  
“You  _are_ , though.” The words cut into me like blades, sinking down to the core of me and freezing me from the inside out with cold, steely intent. “I know the capacity for evil when I see it, and baby, you’ve got more capacity than I’ve seen in eons. And that’s why I’m going to give you some options. You can keep up with this stupid little crusade, and I’ll win, make no doubt about it. You and Brendon will both die, and you’ll get the added bonus of me going out of my way to annihilate everyone you’ve ever cared about. Your friends, your colleagues, that cute little airhead girlfriend you’ve got back in Sweet Home Alabama...”  
  
“Leave Keltie outta this -”  
  
“ _Or_.” She cuts me off, her hand gripping hard around my jaw and forcing me to hold eye contact with her, green, green like poison, green like radioactive toxic sludge. “Or you can tell me where the kid is, and you and I can come to a mutually beneficial agreement. Guaranteed safety for you and yours, and hell, when I establish the new world order or lack thereof, you’ll get your own personal throne.”  
  
The sick thing is, I almost let myself imagine it. Power is seductive like that, worms its way into your mind and gives you impossible visions. I can see myself on that throne she’s talking about, see myself with control I’ve never had, with the ability to keep the people I love safe for once instead of watching them die one by one. The world in my head is a world without Brendon and it’s awful and empty, but it’s also a world where William and Jon and Spencer are all safe, a world where Keltie smiles without the slightest hint of fear behind her eyes. That world tempts me, and I hate myself for it. I don’t know if Atiria can read minds or if that temptation is just plain on my face, but either way her lips curl into a feline smile, her hand dropping down to press against my chest as she moves even closer, her breath colliding with my lips in hot puffs.  
  
“I’ve always wanted a protegee,” she breathes, blinking those unearthly green eyes until they flash back to Sierra’s pretty hazel ones. Delicate fingers fiddle with my top button, smirk widening, a full lower lip drawn up between white teeth. “You and me, handsome. There’s nothing we couldn’t do.”  
  
A wicked smile that’s almost a direct echo of hers settles on my lips, and I bring the hand that isn’t holding my gun up to lace my fingers through Sierra’s hair, soft and still smelling like flowery conditioner underneath the pervasive scent of death. My thumb brushes along her temple contemplatively, lips centimeters from her until I tighten my hand into an abrupt fist and  _yank_ , the unexpected force of it sending her sprawling to the blood-soaked floor.  
  
“Now I’m gonna give _you_ some options, you loathsome, disgusting piece of shit.” The words come out in a snarl, and I feel bigger than I am, looming over her with my fists clenched tightly enough to make my bones ache. “You can keep up with this plan of yours, hell, you can even stop tryin’ to go after Brendon and walk away right now, and someday I will find you and _kill you._ I don’t care if it’s impossible. I’ll make a way.  _Or_.” I drawl in a mockery of her earlier proposal, pressing a boot to her throat to keep her on the floor as I lean down over her. “Or, if you got any sorta sense of self-preservation in that fucked-up head of yours, you better kill me while I’m right here. Because I will  _never_  be your lackey, Atiria. I’d die first.”  
  
I’m flying backwards before I even have time to realize it, smacking into the wall hard enough that the pictures still hanging up come crashing to the floor. There’s an oppressive weight pressed to my throat, and my breaths are nothing more than useless heaving of my lungs, hands clawing at an attacker that isn’t there.  
  
“Fine.  _Fine_ , Ryan. I gave you a chance,” Atiria seethes, getting to her feet with eyes that gleam like emerald flames, walking over to where I’m suspended three feet in the air. “And once again, you’ve proved yourself to be a spectacular moron. So you know what?  _Go_. Go back to your little sacred vessel and do your best to protect him. It’ll only be sweeter when I make you watch me tear him apart. And then I’ll kill you. Slowly. Painfully. But not just yet. Because despite your idiocy, I have a feeling you’ll be of use to me someday. I keep my enemies close and my assets closer.”  
  
The weight around my throat relaxes, and Atiria turns her back on me, sidling over to the front door and swinging it open before turning around to give me one parting glance. “Keep that sacred blood running nice and hot for me, sweet cheeks. Brendon and I will both thank you for it.”  
  
The door clicks shut, and I curl against the wall, wheezing for air and wondering what the consequences of this move I’ve made will be. And there will be consequences. It only takes one look at Pete and Patrick to remind me of that.

 

* * *

By the time I pull into Sierra’s driveway, I’ve gone thirty-five hours without sleep, but my body doesn’t feel it. I haven’t felt too much of anything for the entire trip, so invested in keeping that internal switch turned off that the whole trip passed in a blur. My only moment of weakness came when I was driving through the streets of Chicago, fishing the prepaid cell phone I bought earlier out of my pocket and calling the Chicago Police Department, pretending to be a concerned neighbor who hadn’t seen Patrick or Pete out and about in a few days. Somewhere between reciting the address and being asked to provide my name, I started to get choked up, tears pricking at the backs of my eyes as I feigned a bad reception and snapped the phone in half, pulling over to the side of the road to catch my breath before shutting myself down again and heading full-speed towards the highway. I threw the pieces of the phone out the window in different states, tried to tell myself that I was throwing out my horror and grief along with them. It didn’t work.  
  
I sit and look up at the house for a few minutes, my engine idling. I’d thought the hard part was over, but now I realize that I’ll have to go inside and tell everyone every awful detail. How Pete and Patrick died for nothing because of my stupidity, how Atiria’s as hot on our trail as she ever was, maybe more so after I threw her offer back in her face.  
  
The hard part’s never over. My entire life is one long extended shitstorm. I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.  
  
I sit there and breathe because it’s all I can do, all of the energy sapped from me. Five minutes pass. Ten. Eventually, I fish my phone out of my jacket pocket, barely any battery life left, scroll down through an onslaught of unread text messages.  
  
 _Let me know what’s going on when you’ve got time, okay?  
  
???  
  
It’s been like two hours. Are you okay?  
  
Ry?  
  
Ryan. Answer me.  
  
RYAN. FUCKING TEXT ME BACK. CALL ME. SOMETHING.  
  
Please be okay. Oh my God, please be okay.  
  
If you let your phone die again I’ll kick your ass, I swear.  
  
Please answer me. I’m scared, Ry. Pick up your phone._  
  
I reach forward, turn the key and pull it out of the ignition. The distance between the car and the front door looks like miles to my heavy heart and weary body, but Brendon’s on the other side of it. It’s that knowledge that makes me grab my backpack out of the passenger’s seat and drag myself out of the car, step after torturous step until I’m standing with my hand poised over the doorknob. I’ve only spent a few nights in this house, but knowing who’s inside makes it feel like coming home.  
  
The front door swings open to the sound of muffled voices floating up the hallway from the kitchen, rapidly silenced when they hear the creak of the hinges. A few long, tense seconds pass before I hear the sound of a chair frantically being scraped back, footsteps thudding up the hall. “Ryan?!”  
  
I look at Brendon. He looks at me. I don’t know what the look on my face is, but thank God, I don’t need to say a word. I inhale slowly, drop my backpack to the floor. He takes three tentative steps toward me, opens his arms. My switch flicks back on with enough power to break me to pieces, and I collapse into his waiting embrace, bringing us both to our knees.  
  
The onslaught of grief tears me apart, a long list of everything I’ve lost playing on an endless loop in my mind. I’ve always tried my best to not let anyone see me break. It was the one rule that Dad always ground into me with unrelenting force,  _Don’t show ‘em your weaknesses, boy, they’ll take ‘em and make weapons._  I took that sentiment everywhere with me, lived by it, held it in the esteem that most people hold their prayers. Now, it’s just like everything else in my life. Gone. The sobs tearing their way out of my throat are pieces of a full-body, consuming lamentation, rattling up my spine and hitching my breaths into sharp, painful hiccups that don’t really get me any oxygen. I cry up to and past the point that my whole body hurts, hands fisting in Brendon’s shirt and face buried in the crook of his neck, not even able to notice or care how his whole shoulder is damp after a few minutes.  
  
He doesn’t try to pry some explanation from my useless mouth, doesn’t even try to really talk to me. Brendon just holds me through the shaking and the tears, his fingers running soothingly through my hair while he whispers pointless, arbitrary things against the shell of my ear, pretty lies like  _It’s okay, baby, it’s going to be okay_  and  _It’s not your fault, Ry, please don’t do this to yourself._  All I can do is cling to him and try to ride the waves of my meltdown until I can find my way back to the shore of his heartbeat underneath my grasping hands, ragged sobs fading out to shallow little gasps and tears drying into sticky trails on my cheeks.  
  
When I pull away, still shaking, Brendon’s eyes are damp and swollen too, but his hands are steady as they cradle my jaw, bring me forward until our foreheads are pressed together. “I’m glad you’re okay. Fuck, I was so scared.”  
  
You and I have different definitions of  _okay_ , kid.  
  
Slowly, and with more than a little help on Brendon’s part, I manage to get back on my feet again, my breathing still uneven. I don’t know where to start, don’t really  _want_  to start. All I want right now is the big bed upstairs and him beside me, to sleep until all of this goes away and we can wake up in a world that doesn’t hurt this much. But that world doesn’t exist, never has and never will, so instead of trying to construct some useless fantasy, I lean down, unzip my backpack.  
  
Silently, I lift Patrick’s fedora from the worn canvas and hand it to Brendon. That says it all.  
  
Brendon’s fingers curl around the rim of the hat and a shaky sob bursts past his lips, but he manages to hold onto most of his composure, blinking back tears and looking back up at me. “I know they were your friends…  _our_  friends. But don’t ever leave me like that again.”  
  
I wipe at my eyes with the heel of my hand, adjusting my jacket and trying to remember how to stand on my own. “Okay.”  
  
Okay. I won’t. I could elaborate, tell him how I don’t ever want to leave him again because I feel the worst sort of empty when he’s not there, how he makes me better, how he squashes that capacity for evil that I’ve honestly always known was in me. But that’s not how we work, Brendon and I. Things like that are never conveyed in words, better spoken by the way I pull him into the spindly circle of my arms, the way it feels like a natural motion for him to tilt his head up and press his lips to mine.  
  
“I’m goin’ to bed. Come with me,” I whisper against his mouth, the fatigue already settling heavily across my limbs. What little energy I had left was consumed by all that crying, and I’m left empty and aching, craving a handful of Ambien and Brendon curled into me as a reminder that there’s one bright spot left in my existence, just one. I need that to hold onto if I’m going to make it through the days to come.  
  
He pulls away and looks anxiously at the floor, shifting his weight back and forth. “Uh… Ry, something happened while you were gone. I know you need to sleep, but it’s kind of urgent.”  
  
A million possibilities flash through my mind - one of the Winchesters getting hurt, news of Keltie having some sort of brutal accident, anyone else on my long span of weaknesses turning up dead. My stomach sinks down to my shoes. “What’s goin’ on, Brendon?”  
  
“I, um… Just come into the kitchen for a minute. I honestly don’t know how to explain it.”  
  
Every step I take adds to the apprehension, the hallway stretching back into infinity as Brendon takes my hand and leads me into the kitchen. Dean and Sam are sitting at the table, but it’s not them I pay attention to. No, I’m drawn to the tall figure standing in the far corner, flannel shirt and jeans rumpled, Carhartt boots caked with mud, meeting my stare with very blue eyes. My jaw drops.  
  
“Spencer.”


	14. Chapter 13 - Brendon

“Spencer.”  
  
The shift I see in Ryan is so sudden that it takes me aback, how he goes from looking so broken, so utterly defeated in one moment to something else in the next. The weary inward curve of his spine straightens out, the deadness behind his eyes lights up just the slightest bit. After all this time he’s spent losing everyone, he’s finally got someone back.  
  
My fingers clench tightly around Patrick’s fedora, something heavy settling in my stomach. I should tell him. I can’t tell him. God, I  _can’t_.  
  
And my opportunity goes out the window when Ryan practically lunges across the kitchen, wrapping his skinny arms tightly around Spencer Smith’s sturdier frame, turning the two of them into a tangled mess of plaid flannel. It’s a motion that seems familiar, practiced, and it’s sort of a mind-fuck to think that Ryan’s ever made a habit of hugging  _anyone_. He looks as happy as he could possibly be in our current situation, the loss still clinging to him but a sense of relief taking some of the weight off his shoulders. For now, at least. Sam shifts uncomfortably in his chair. Dean makes a frantic grab into the fridge for a bottle of beer, holding a moment of tense eye contact with me. Ryan doesn’t notice any of it, thumping Spencer on the back before grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling back to get a better look at him. “Hell if you’re not a sight for sore eyes. Thought I lost you, brother.”  
  
Spencer’s a weird sort of complementary contrast to Ryan as far as appearances go. He looks more like what you’d expect of a hunter than Ryan does from the neck down, broader shoulders and more muscle, big hands that look like they could snap you in half, that now-familiar Alabama Chic fashion sense of plaid, Levi’s, and steel-toed boots. He has a kind face, though, freckles and sky-blue eyes, messy brown hair and a few days’ scruff. The only thing that doesn’t make him inherently trustworthy is the way he doesn’t hug Ryan back, tilting his head curiously to the side.  
  
“Oh Christ, here it goes,” Dean mumbles, rubbing at the side of his face and downing half his beer in one swallow.  
  
I couldn’t tell him, so Spencer goes ahead and does it for me. “I regret to inform you that I am not, in fact, Spencer.”  
  
I’m pretty sure that Ryan Ross is the only person I know that can go from hugging someone to pointing a gun at them in less than five seconds.  
  
“Woah, easy!” Sam rushes out, scrambling up from his chair and diving between the two of them. “It’s Spencer’s  _body_ , Ryan, don’t do anything stupid!”  
  
“Y’all got five seconds to tell me what the high holy  _fuck_  is goin’ on here -”  
  
“We’ll do that as soon as we’re not worried about you shooting anyone,” Dean snaps, setting his bottle emphatically on the counter before walking over and yanking Ryan’s gun out of his grip. “I know you’re fresh out of a nasty situation, dude, but now’s not the time to go all Rambo on the people who are trying to help you.”  
  
Ryan scowls and makes a grab for his gun, but Dean pulls it out of the way, matching him glare for glare. The two of them stare each other down for a few seconds, but eventually come to some silent understanding that results in Ryan backing down from the confrontation and rounding on Spencer. “If you ain’t Spence, then who the hell  _are_  you?”  
  
“I have many names, but the one you’re most likely to know me by is Elpis,” Spencer - or rather, Spencer’s body - says simply, leaning against the counter and fixing Ryan with an even, unintimidated stare. “And I believe that you’re in need of my help on the subject of dealing with my sister.”  
  
Silence. It looks like Ryan is about to literally explode, his face draining of color and his fists clenching at his sides. “No. Fuck no, I’ve had  _enough_  of the people I love gettin’ dragged into this shit, so you can just go find someone else to possess, you -”  
  
“Spencer agreed to be my vessel.”  
  
“What?” Ryan cuts himself off mid-rant, shaking his head disbelievingly. “That’s a lie. He’d never do that.”  
  
“It’s not a lie. I came to him two weeks ago, explained the situation, and he gave his informed consent,” Elpis replies, looking a bit offended at being called a liar. “I am not my sister, Ryan. I don’t occupy vessels without their permission. It’s a matter of principle. And truthfully, Spencer didn’t take too much convincing. All it took was three words.”  
  
“Which were?”  
  
Elpis blinks. “They were ‘Ryan’s in trouble.’ I made sure he knew the rest of the story, of course, but he said yes as soon as I told him that.”  
  
“That stupid…” he mutters under his breath, turning on his heel and starting to pace, raking a hand through his hair. “Is he still alive?”  
  
“Alive and well, I assure you.”  
  
“I think you guys need some space…” Sam says diplomatically, grabbing Dean by the arm and hauling him towards the door. “We’ll be in the living room. If we hear screaming or things breaking, we’ll come check on you.”  
  
The Winchesters disappear down the hallway, Dean looking a little bummed out that he’s missing the action. For the first time since entering the kitchen, Ryan looks at me, a ghost of that old instability flashing across his face. “How did this happen?”  
  
“It was only a couple hours before you came back,” I explain, trying to sound soothing but only succeeding in sounding like I’ve got a wad of cotton balls stuck in my throat. I’m not the most stable right now, either. I want nothing more than to go upstairs and crawl in bed with Ryan and spend a night crying over Pete and Patrick and everything else I’ve lost, but I don’t think the luxury of breaking is in the cards for me anytime soon. You keep going because it’s your only option, he told me on that first night, and I’m finally starting to understand what that means. I reach out and grab Ryan’s hand as he paces past me, halting him long enough that he turns and his eyes meet mine, whiskey-brown outlined with sleepless shadows. “Elpis has been looking for me since Atiria killed my family. The only problem is that she -”  
  
 _“She?”_  
  
“Yes, Ryan, Elpis is a her. You can deal with having Spencer’s secondhand masculinity crisis later.” My eyes roll skyward before I can stop them. Behind Ryan, Elpis smirks a bit. “Anyway, that hex bag you made took me off of her radar as well as Atiria’s. I guess word got around about your role in the prophecy, and she figured that the best way to find me was to find you, so that’s why she went to Spencer. But he didn’t know too much concerning any of that, and you and I were both under the hex bag’s protection. She had no idea where to find us until I burned the thing, and by the time she popped into the graveyard, we were gone.”  
  
“So how’d you end up findin’ him here?” Ryan says, sounding more scared than he probably wants to let on as he rounds on Elpis, his jaw tensing. “I made the exact same hex bag over again, and those sigils that Cas did are meant to keep Brendon shielded.”  
  
“Shielded from forces of  _Evil_ , if you read the proverbial fine print. However, they act as a beacon for forces of Good. Castiel and I, we… what’s the phrasing… ‘go way back.’ I’m sure that he realized I would be looking for the two of you as soon as he became aware of the situation, constructed the sigils in a way that would help me find you,” Elpis replies, extremely calm for some that’s got an angry, self-professed redneck with twenty-four years of killing experience under his belt up in their face.  
  
He doesn’t look comforted by that at all, his face ashen as his hands close around Spencer’s shoulders. “But Atiria can’t find him here? This is important. I  _need_  to know if there’s any way she can find him here.”  
  
“Ry, what does it matter? She thinks I’m dead, remember?” I offer, wondering why he’s so adamant about it.  
  
Ryan falters a bit, looking like he’s a second away from breaking as he turns to look back at me, swallowing heavily. “She knows you’re alive. She was waitin’ for me in Chicago.”  
  
 _“What?!”_  Panic rises in my throat for a whole long list of reasons. She knows I’m alive, she’s still after me, she was there waiting for Ryan, Ryan could’ve been hurt, Ryan could’ve died, Ryan, Ryan,  _Ryan…_  
  
“That’s what Pete and Patrick died for,” he replies thickly, blinking back the shiny veneer that’s welled up over his eyes again. “It was a trap to lure me out there. She knew I wouldn’t bring you with me, but seein’ me alive was enough to convince her that you were too.”  
  
“And you just walked away? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re all right, but shouldn’t you be… y’know. Dead?”  
  
“She made me an offer that I very bluntly refused, and then she let me go. Hell if I know why. Said somethin’ about keeping her assets close,” Ryan shrugs, walking to where I’m standing and hopping up to sit on the counter beside me.  
  
“What was the offer?” I ask.  
  
He looks at me for a long stretch of time, almost like he’s deciding whether or not to say it. “Typical supervillain bullshit. You in exchange for the safety of my loved ones and a place for me at her right hand in the new world order. It was all very Darth Vader á la ‘Empire Strikes Back.’ Lazy. Unoriginal. I told her to go fuck herself.”  
  
I’m kissing him before he has time to fully finish the sentence, stealing the breath from his lips and letting my consciousness swim with him. Self-sacrifice isn’t a big deal for Ryan. I know that much about him. He’ll throw himself under the proverbial bus for just about anything because he doesn’t think he deserves more than that, but offering up the ones he cares about is something on an entirely different level. The fact that he put a whole list of people on the chopping block rather than hand me over is horrible and sad and wrong, but it says so much more than Ryan will ever be able to tell me with his halting words and careful distances. He speaks the language of silence and sacrifice, and in his own dialect he’s just told me something that will probably never leave his mouth. And that’s okay with me.  
  
We both break a little into the kiss, breaths stuttering and hands clinging to each other, mine balled up in his jacket, his woven through my hair. We’re falling apart and we know it, our faltering souls held together by masking tape and prayers and the fact that we’ve got each other to lean on as that only barrier between us and the unforgiving ground. Ryan’s lips are chapped from the cold air outside and taste of salt, but there’s still a steadiness they lend, something that spreads through the marrow of my bones and makes me feel a little more grounded. It’s a puzzle piece sliding into place, the last note filling out a harmony. He found out a few days ago that I’d come back from the dead for him. I found out today that he’d throw everything he cares about away for me. I’ve started believing in this whole ‘written in the stars’ thing. In fact, it’s just about the only thing I believe in anymore.  
  
Elpis clears her throat awkwardly, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first time in the past minute or so that we’ve even realized we weren’t alone in the kitchen. Ryan pulls away looking regretful that he has to, jumping down off the counter and shoving his hands in his pockets. “So, you’re Atiria’s sister, and you wanna help us. Sibling rivalry?”  
  
“You could call it that.” Despite the initial tension between them, Elpis offers Ryan a small grin. I don’t know if her smile is the same as Spencer’s, but it’s a nice one, genuine and soft. “I don’t want to see the ruination of this world. The human race has the ability to do great things, but nothing will be able to make it intact through the devastation Atiria has planned. So yes, I want to help you. I don’t know how much you’re aware of, but the two of you are -”  
  
“The Prophecy’s Hero and the Sacred Vessel, yeah. Intertwined fates, the saviors of mankind, all that jazz,” I shrug, waving it off. Weeks ago, the very words sent me into a cataclysm of blind terror. Now, it’s like I’m discussing what I had for breakfast this morning. There’s something to be said of trial by fire. It’s tempered me. I’ve gone from softness to steel in the course of a month.  
  
“Although I must say, I’m surprised. There was nothing in the prophecy about…” Elpis gestures vaguely between Ryan and I, obviously trying to put it delicately. “Erm.  _That_.”  
  
“We’re playin’ the whole prophecy thing by ear. I guess we took a few liberties on the ‘fates are one’ part,” Ryan says, smirking slightly before his expression shifts and he’s suddenly all business again. “And I’ll be thankful for the help, but I got a few conditions. I want your promise right now that Spencer’s gonna be okay. When this is over, he walks away without a scratch, otherwise it ain't happenin’.”  
  
“A perfectly reasonable request. I can even let Spencer have control over his consciousness during this ordeal, although I would of course be able to take over when needed.”  
  
“And I want full disclosure. No cryptic bullshit like Castiel spouts all the time. If I got a question and you got an answer, I wanna know it straight up,” he presses, crossing his arms and glaring.  
  
“I’ll answer any questions you have to the best of my ability,” Elpis nods, looking between the both of us. “I overheard what happened. The two of you need time to rest and mourn, but we can begin working on a strategy tomorrow.”  
  
Ryan looks from Elpis to me and back to Elpis again, mulling it over before sticking out his hand. “Then you got yourself a deal.”  
  
As they shake hands, Elpis’ eyes blaze. Not green like Atiria’s, but a bright, crystalline silver that has its own source of light before it fades back out to blue irises, fluttering lids and a confused expression. “Hot damn. Y’all got any food? She keeps forgettin’ that I gotta eat.”  
  
Spencer’s voice is a light, amiable tenor, a long drawl identical to Ryan’s coloring it that wasn’t there when Elpis was speaking. He stretches his arms with a sleepy groan, running a hand through his hair before looking at Ryan with a big, toothy grin. “Long time no see, brother.”  
  
Ryan’s fist connects with his jaw so hard that there’s an audible crack of bone on bone as Spencer goes sprawling to the floor with a yelp.  
  
“You dumb son of a bitch,” Ryan seethes, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and hauling him back to his feet, getting right up in his face. He’s already working his way up to another punch even though he'd hit him with the same hand he injured punching the mirror, the bandages around his knuckles stained fresh red. His other hand is wadded up in Spencer’s shirt, shaking him back and forth like a rag doll. “What the hell were you thinkin’, Spence?! Why would you let some fuckin’ celestial…  _thing_  use you for a meatsuit, man, you know better than that! You could’ve up and got yourself killed!”  
  
“I was thinkin’ that my best friend had himself up shit creek without a paddle and that I could help,” Spencer replies, rubbing at the side of his face. “You damn near dislocated my jaw, you bastard.”  
  
“What I oughta do is beat you silly,” Ryan snaps back, shoving Spencer away and shaking his head. “Someone obviously needs to knock some sense into that melon head of yours.”  
  
“I’d love to see your skinny ass try, Ross.”  
  
“I just might.” And then in the space of a second, they’re hugging, a borderline violent embrace involving tight grips and lots of back-slapping. When Ryan finally pulls back, he’s smiling. Just a little, the curvature of his lips sad and somewhat forced, but a smile nonetheless. “You’re a stupid motherfucker, Spencer Smith, but I’m glad you ain’t dead. I got enough funerals to go to after this whole thing’s over.”  
  
Spencer frowns, laying a hand on Ryan’s shoulder before letting go and moving back a step. “I can hear everything in there even when Elpis has the steerin’ wheel. I’m sorry about Patrick and Pete, man. I know y’all were close. They were good guys.”  
  
“Yeah,” he mumbles, swallowing heavily, and it’s so strange, how that one syllable can encompass everything going on in the subtext, all those admissions of loss and hurt that Ryan won’t ever say out loud. He sighs and leans against the counter for a moment like he’s lost his ability to support himself, eyes fluttering shut before he looks between Spencer and me tiredly, shrugging out of his jacket and throwing it across the back of one of the chairs. “We can talk about what the hell we’re gonna do tomorrow. I’m goin’ on two days with no sleep, so I won’t be much good until I can get some shut-eye. I’m headin’ up to bed. Bren?”  
  
“I’ll be up in a bit.” I try to smile, but the motion comes out as more of a grimace. I grab Ryan’s hand as he passes, and he gives mine a halfhearted squeeze, darting down and kissing my cheek before he disappears around the corner into the hallway.  
  
It’s all very quiet, nothing but the sound of the heater kicking on somewhere in the depths of the house and Ryan’s feet thumping up the stairs. Spencer and I share a long look before he breaks the silence, nodding at the doorway that Ryan just walked through. “So, uh… how long’ve you two…”  
  
“We met about a month ago, but as for, um… It’s been a couple days. We’re still kind of working things out.” The explanation is stammered and halted, both because I’m kind of uncomfortable with the critical look Spencer’s giving me and because honestly, I don’t know the answer to the question. How long has this been going on? I can’t truly mark the starting point as the moment when Ryan kissed me, not when there have been things we’ve done together that run so much deeper - a soft  _Come back to me_  echoes through my head, and it makes everything seem a little less horrible for a few seconds.  
  
“I heard Dean mention what happened to Z. How’s he handlin’ it?” Spencer asks, looking concerned.  
  
I shift my weight back and forth nervously, wringing my hands. “I don’t think he  _is_  handling it, to tell you the truth. When something emotionally crippling happens Ryan’s got this bad habit of -”  
  
“Shuttin’ down, yeah. I’ve known him since we were in diapers, believe me, I know how he gets,” he sighs, turning around and digging through the cupboard until he comes up with a bag of potato chips, munching on one thoughtfully. “You can’t let him do that, Brendon. Take it from someone who’s been his best friend for his whole life, bein’ with Ryan ain’t no picnic. He’s as backward and tight-lipped as they come, but if you let him force that shit down, there’s a tippin’ point that’ll come along and set him off and he’ll turn into something you  _really_  don’t wanna have to deal with.”  
  
“Noted,” I nod, taking a few steps backwards and looking down the hallway. I can hear Dean and Sam having a muttered conversation in the living room, but I’m more concerned with what’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs, laying wide-eyed and hollow in the nest of rumpled blankets on the bed that’s become mine. “I should probably go. I don’t want him to be alone, not after -”  
  
“One more thing.” Spencer cuts me off, the look on his face grave. “I get that you’re the big centerpiece in this whole end of the world thing, and I get that Ryan cares about you. But if you hurt him, I’ll wring your neck with my bare hands, kid, prophecy or not.”  
  
There’s no doubt in my mind that he means it. I don’t want to test the validity of Spencer’s word for more reasons than one. “I… I would never… God, after everything I’ve been through with him, why would I want to hurt him? I’m not like that! And who are you, his guard dog?! Believe me, dude, Ryan’s more than capable of kicking my ass if I piss him off. He’s done it before. I’m not going to hurt him, Spencer. The world’s done enough of that for me to add to it.”  
  
“Good.” The look Spencer fixes me with is still judgmental and a little scary, but he breaks into a smile after a second, nodding like I’ve passed some sort of test. “You better get on up there. He needs you.”  
  
 _And what about what I need?!_  I suddenly feel like yelling. There’s a lot that can be said for Ryan’s volatility, sure, but what about mine? It’s so unfair for everyone to treat me like I’m just expected to be the one that’s okay in all of this. Neither of us are okay. We’re both a few seconds away from a massive breakdown at any given moment, and with every passing second we get a little further away from being able to function even somewhat normally. They can’t expect me to be some sort of rock when I’m falling apart just as much as Ryan is. The only difference between the two of us is that we’re being ripped to shreds by different things. Ryan’s lost Z, lost his friends, lost his sense of where he stands in the world. And me, I’ve lost things, too. I might not have known Pete and Patrick for as long as Ryan did, but they were still my friends; I still feel their loss eating away corrosively at my insides. I try not to think of my family anymore because when I do, I can’t breathe for all the crippling grief and guilt that comes crashing down around my head. And there’s always that omnipresent knowledge in the back of my mind that the lives of everyone on the planet are riding on the stuff in my veins, on this power that people say I possess but I haven’t even begun to see yet. I’m scared with every breath I take and grieving with every move I make, and I’m not the strong one in this, I never have been. I’ve lost things, too. Where are the people saying  _Go to Brendon, he needs you,_  giving a single solitary damn about how I’m coping (or not) with the literal weight of the world on my shoulders? It’s not that I’m bitter.  
  
Yes I am. I’m so bitter and angry that sometimes I forget I ever had the ability to be happy. The only times I’m ever able to remember are when Ryan finds a way to remind me, and I’m not so jaded that I’ll sit here in the midst of my own pity party and let him try to work his way through this alone. It wouldn’t end well for either of us.  
  
I sigh and turn on my heel, walking out of the kitchen, leaving Patrick’s fedora on the counter when I leave. Looking at it makes a horrible, heavy pain sit in the center of me, and I can’t imagine that Ryan wants to lay there and stare at that visible reminder of the horror he just walked out of for the rest of the night. My feet feel heavy as I climb up the stairs, not even sparing Sam and Dean a second glance as I pass them, staring at me from the living room couch with a million questions in their eyes. Let  _them_  be the ones who don’t get any answers for once.  
  
Ryan is laying on his back on top of the covers, staring blankly at the ceiling. He doesn’t acknowledge my entry into the room other than scooting a bit to the side, making room for me on the mattress. It’s like something has entirely sapped the life out of him, I think as I kick my shoes off and climb up beside him. He looks so much smaller like this, so much more fragile, to the point that he almost feels like a life-size doll when I pull him into my arms, his limbs lifeless and eyes empty. I breathe out in a huff as I try to move to a position where I can see him better, a hand settling on either side of his face and forcing him to hold eye contact. “Hey. Don’t shut down on me, okay?”  
  
“Why not?” he asks, his voice so hollow that it doesn’t even sound like Ryan.  
  
“Because I need you.”  
  
If one of us is going to be straightforward with things like this, it’s almost always going to be me. The truth is selfish and awful, but what we both need right now is truth. Regardless of what Spencer said, Ryan could probably use a few hours of turning the world off for the sake of his own shaky mental stability. But I can’t afford to let him do that, because I’m not capable of shutting down the way he is. I need something to tether me to reality, need  _him_ , and if he’s gone, my reaction will be a whole lot worse than just staring at the ceiling. I think back to the meltdown I had at HQ a week ago, of the knife held speculatively between my fingers and the empty Ambien bottle. I’d promised to never be that stupid again, but how well can I keep a promise without Ryan there to hold me accountable for it? I’d like to think I’m stronger than that, but my cautious optimism doesn’t erase the possibility that if he checks out of the functional world now, I’ll completely lose it. I don’t need him to comfort me, to promise me that everything will be all right. He’s the one who needs that right now, and I can give him that much. All I need is the knowledge that he’s in this with me.  
  
“You don’t. Y’all would be better off without me, if you want the truth of it,” Ryan mutters, shaking his head mechanically. “All I done from the get-go is mess things up. You almost died because of me. Pete and Patrick died because of me. Atiria’s back on the warpath because of me. And then I come back to this, find out that Spencer of all people’s gotten pulled in, and now I’m just left wonderin’ when the other shoe’ll drop and I’ll do something to get him killed, too.”  
  
“None of that was your fault, Ryan. She’s been five steps ahead of us this whole time. Pete and Patrick knew the risks. It’s up to us to make sure that they didn’t die for nothing, okay? There’s still a big, shitty world out there that needs saving, and I can’t do it alone.” My voice cracks a little on the last admission, my breath hitching beneath the place where Ryan’s hand is pressed seekingly against my heartbeat. “You promised you would stick this out with me. I’m holding you to it.”  
  
I don’t know exactly what I’ve said to set him off, but I’ve apparently triggered that tipping point Spencer was talking about. Ryan dissolves all over again, regressing back to the shivering, inconsolable mess he was when he walked through the door. I feel useless, unable to do anything but hold him, fingers tracing nonsensical patterns up and down his spine as he shakes and curls into my chest, struggling to breathe. “She… she ripped ‘em  _apart_ , Brendon. There was blood everywhere and I… fuck, I had to drag Patrick’s body upstairs so I could seal the library. I had to fuckin’  _scrub his blood outta the floorboards._  And it was my fault for draggin’ the two of ‘em into this. They weren’t like me. They got people who’ll miss ‘em. Pete’s mom and dad are still alive. Patrick had a girlfriend. How the hell do I justify what happened to those people? I can’t, I can’t make sense of why this is happenin’, and then I go to leave and she’s just standin’ there in the livin’ room, and she told me all this awful shit about how I’ve got the most capacity for evil she’s ever seen and how I’m just like her, tried to get me to hand you over like it was nothin’ at all, threatened to kill everyone else if I didn’t.”  
  
A violent, sick feeling spreads through me as I try to imagine what it must have been like to clean up a bloody crime scene, what it must have been like for Ryan to spend hours looking at the cold corpses of people who had treated him like a brother. It’s almost like trying to imagine myself staying behind in Vegas that day so long ago, sweeping up the carnage and putting my family’s bodies into more dignified positions. There’s no way I could have done it. It would have driven me insane, and I’m starting to think maybe that trauma has gotten to Ryan, sparking that deadness behind his eyes and the frantic way he clings to the fabric of my shirt, like I’ll disappear if he’s not careful.  
  
“I’m so sorry.” He hates sympathy. I know he does, but surprisingly, he doesn’t lash out at me for it. All Ryan does is cling to me a bit more tightly, his frantic, futile attempts to even out his breathing rasping through the stillness of the bedroom. I wonder if this is what Spencer was talking about, how he’s capable of turning into something I really don’t want to deal with. It’s not so much that I don’t  _want_  to, it’s that I don’t know  _how_. I’m so used to Ryan being carefully impassive that an outburst of emotion on this level seems completely unprecedented, leaving me helpless in the face of his panicked gasps and almost-sobs.  
  
After a few minutes, he calms himself down to only mild tremors, little hiccups of breath rather than ragged wheezes. It’s gotten dark outside, but his eyes are still visible, shining in the dimness of the porch light outside the window, big and more scared than I’ve ever seen them as a broken whisper falls past his lips. “I don’t wanna do this anymore, Bren. I  _can’t_  do this.”  
  
“I know,” I murmur into the tousled mess his hair’s become, smelling cigarette smoke and something sharp that might be cleaning products. It’s not an answer, not a solution, but it’s all the comfort I can give him. “I know, Ry. I know.”  
  
Sometimes just having someone acknowledge your struggle is more effective than them coddling you and promising the impossible. He taught me that.  
  
He falls asleep to a continuous, soft mantra of  _I know, I know, I know,_  and I follow him not long after, my heavy heart weighing down my consciousness and pulling me into a softer world, one that makes its borders out of the spaces between Ryan’s heartbeats. For a little while, nothing beyond that matters.

* * *

I wake up to the decadent smell of breakfast food, the mingling scents of coffee and bacon yanking me out of my mercifully dreamless sleep. Sunlight is slanting through the gaps in the curtains and the alarm clock on the bedside table reads eight o’clock. More than twelve hours of sleep. It’s the small victories.  
  
Ryan is still out cold, his breath washing in slow, long streams of warmth across the crook of my neck, one skinny arm flung around my waist. Someone - I don’t know whether it was Spencer, Dean, or Sam - must have thrown a blanket over us while we were asleep, the soft fabric of an old quilt I’m pretty sure I saw down in the living room lending a little extra warmth. I’m wide awake now and my stomach is growling demandingly, but I don’t want to move for fear of waking Ryan up. He’s going to sleep as long as he wants, and God help Dean Winchester if he tries to say otherwise.  
  
I shift a little bit in an effort to stop my arm from falling asleep, and Ryan groans in my ear, rolling over and burrowing down into his pillow until all that’s visible of him is his nose, one closed eye, and a messy tuft of hair. Well, there’s that problem solved. Slowly, carefully, I peel back the corner of the quilt and roll out of bed, putting some pillows in the Brendon-shaped dent left in the mattress. By the time I’ve grabbed a change of clothes and tiptoed over to the door with the intention of going down the hall to take a shower, Ryan’s rolled back over, curled into the pillows I left in my place. My heart does a weird swooping thing and I scowl at myself, grumbling internally that now isn’t the time for me to act like a fucking middle schooler as I duck out of the bedroom and shut the door behind me with a quiet click.  
  
Dean, Sam, and Spencer are all milling about in the kitchen when I walk downstairs, running a hand through my damp hair and pulling a well-worn hoodie over my head. “Hey, guys.”  
  
“Ryan?” Sam asks, handing me a mug of coffee that I gratefully accept.  
  
“Still sleeping,” I answer, taking small, piping-hot sips and looking around at the three of them. “I figure he needs the rest. We can bring him up to speed when he gets up.”  
  
“Works for me,” Spencer shrugs, poking at a skillet full of bacon with a spatula and not even bothering to look at me. “How d’you like your eggs, kid?”  
  
I blink owlishly at him, so flabbergasted by the idea of a real meal that it takes me a minute to think of an answer. “Um… over easy?”  
  
“Grits?”  
  
“No thanks.”  
  
“No grits with your breakfast? You heathen. I bet you don’t even drink sweet tea,” he laughs, grabbing a carton of eggs from the fridge and cracking a couple into another frying pan. Dean’s already at the table digging his way through a mountain of scrambled eggs, and Sam’s moved over to sit on the counter, scrolling through a laptop that’s plugged into the wall and polishing off his own cup of coffee. “We ain’t started nothin’ yet, figured you and Ross wouldn’t be up until noon. Decided I’d make a decent breakfast before I go all ‘Touched By An Angel’ again and Elpis forgets to let me eat for a week. I mean, it don’t hurt me or nothin’, but I’m hungrier’n a bear fresh off hibernation when she lets me have the reins again.”  
  
“You think Ryan will get mad at me for looking through his backpack?” Sam asks, holding up a thick file folder with a leather cord wrapped around it. “I thought there might be some useful stuff he brought back from HQ. I’m working on decrypting Pete’s laptop right now, but I think most of our info’s going to come out of this folder. Ryan told me you’re a better researcher than he is; you want to see what you make of it?”  
  
Over our heads, the sound of footsteps creaks across the ceiling and the pipes in the wall hiss as someone turns on the shower. Dean looks up briefly before going back to his breakfast. “Guess Sleeping Beauty awakens.”  
  
I wander over and take the folder from Sam’s outstretched hand, slipping the leather cord off. It’s attached to a hex bag that looks pretty similar to mine. Was that meant to protect the person who found it or the folder itself? Frowning, I set the hex bag off to the side and flip the folder open, shuffling silently through its contents for a few minutes before looking up. “Some more Greek Mythology stuff, but that’s not what’s confusing. There are a bunch of copies of old certificates, some auction records, a bunch of notes in the margins. It looks like Patrick was tracking down something. Like, something literal. A tangible object that’s been bought and sold over the years. But I don’t get what something like that would have to do with -”  
  
“Someone give me coffee, stat,” Ryan grumbles, shuffling into the kitchen with a grumpy expression. His hair is still wet, water droplets falling down to leave little dark stains on the shoulders of his shirt. Sam fills up a fresh mug and holds it out, and Ryan accepts it with a grunt of what might be thanks before going over to dig through the pockets of the jacket he left thrown over the back of the chair last night. After a few seconds, he comes up with a dented old flask and starts fiddling with the top, mumbling under his breath.  
  
“Christ, Ryan, it’s eight thirty in the morning,” Dean protests, finishing off his plate and standing up to go put it in the sink. Ryan responds by looking him dead in the eye as he dumps the entire contents of the flask - which was at least a third of the way full - into his mug and takes a long sip. Dean rolls his eyes and sits back down.  
  
“I wanted to - thanks, Spencer - I wanted to let you sleep,” I tell him, grabbing the plate full of eggs and bacon that Spencer shoves at me and setting it on the counter. “You can go back up to bed if you want. We’re just looking through this file Sam found.”  
  
“Thanks for diggin’ through my stuff, Winchester,” Ryan snaps in Sam’s direction, yanking one of the chairs out and folding himself into it with a malicious glare. “I slept too long as it is. You find anything useful?”  
  
“I think Patrick was trying to track something down,” I say, grabbing a slice of bacon and walking over to him with a handful of the papers I was just looking through. “There’s a bunch of records of something being bought and sold, and then it drops off the map about 1950, but I can’t tell exactly what it is we’re looking at, here.”  
  
“Pandora’s Box,” says Spencer - or rather, I think it’s Spencer until he turns around and I see the bright silver flash of his eyes.  
  
“Hi, Elpis,” Dean practically groans, kicking his chair back on its rear legs and rubbing a hand over his face.  
  
“You’re shittin’ me,” Ryan gapes, grabbing the papers and looking back and forth between me and Elpis. “Assumin’ that Pandora’s Box is a real thing and not some metaphorical bullshit, it’d have to be tens of thousands of years old. Anything that old would be dust by now, and you’re sayin’ it was sold in some Rotary Benefit Auction in 1937?”  
  
“Oh, it’s very real,” Elpis says, grimacing. “I spent quite some time locked up in the thing, so I’ll be the first to attest to its tangibility. And the box isn’t like mortal objects, which fall to decay and age. It was divinely crafted, not to mention made to be the most powerful prison in the known Universe. It’s literally impossible to destroy.”  
  
“But how does something that powerful get leaked into a consumer’s market?” Sam asks, flipping open his own laptop and opening up a search engine. “Shouldn’t there be some… I don’t know, some guardian of the box? Someone whose job it was to keep it safe?”  
  
“What would be the point in that?” Elpis asks, offering a confused head tilt. “Every bad thing inside of it had already escaped. It was empty. There was nothing to guard. However, the box itself is considered to be quite the collector’s piece, and has been in the possession of everyone from demons to gods to mortal men.”  
  
“Mortal men who thought it was an ‘Ancient Greek jewelry box,’ apparently,” I hum, reading one of the lot descriptions off the auction record. “But why would Patrick want to find it? And why is there no record of it after 1950?”  
  
“Patrick said on the phone ‘I tracked it down as far as I could...’ Maybe this is what he was talkin’ about,” mutters Ryan, tracking a long finger down the lines of text. “But why?”  
  
“Because it’s possible to put Atiria back in the box,” Elpis says simply.  
  
My head snaps up in perfect unison with Ryan, Sam, and Dean, all of us chorusing a sharp “What?!”  
  
“An incantation,” she explains, gesturing vaguely in my direction, “that if spoken by one of sacred blood could re-imprison her. Of course, there’s no telling how long it would hold, maybe years, maybe centuries. But it would at least give us time to formulate a more permanent solution.”  
  
“Okay, great plan, ‘cept for the part where we got no idea how to find the damn thing.” And of course, it would be Ryan to drag down any sense of optimism we might have had. “1950 is a long way off to track down one little box, and -”  
  
“I know where it is.”  
  
Ryan takes a long drink of his spiked coffee, glaring at her viciously. “Jesus Cotton Pickin’ Christ, why the hell would you not tell us that in the first place?!”  
  
“Because you won’t like it when I tell you where it is,” Elpis replies, suddenly looking a little nervous. “I began looking for the box in the midst of my search for Brendon, and I was able to track it down, but… acquiring it will be far from easy.”  
  
“Why? Who’s got it?” I ask.  
  
She shifts back and forth, the expression on Spencer’s face knitting into sheer anxiety as Elpis looks from Dean to Sam to Ryan, but not at me. “Is anyone here familiar with a demon by the name of Crowley?”  
  
Ryan’s jaw drops, the room collapsing into dumbfounded silence for a few moments. In one sharp motion, he knocks back the remainder of his drink, slamming the mug down on the table. “Fuck  _me_.”  
  
“Wait, what? I don’t get it.” If Ryan’s reaction and the look on Dean’s face are any indicator, what Elpis just revealed is far from good. “Who’s Crowley?”  
  
“Oh, he’s no one important,” Ryan drawls sardonically. “Just the king of Hell.”  
  
I feel like my stomach is attempting some form of Olympic gymnastics. “Oh shit.”  
  
“Why. God,  _why_ , of all the -” Dean leans forward, resting his forehead against the table and groaning. “Ryan, make the call. I know what the call is, man, but you gotta make it.”  
  
Sighing heavily, Ryan stands up and rakes a hand through his damp hair, starting to pace across the worn linoleum. “Fuckin’ hell. I mean, we gotta get the box, right? It’s our only ace in the hole at this point. Dean, you still got that summoning ritual on file?”  
  
“So what, you’re just going to sit down in the living room for drinks with Crowley and give him a nice little sales pitch about why he should give you the box?” Sam deadpans, snapping his laptop shut.  
  
“That’s exactly what I’m plannin’ to do, actually.” There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and Ryan lives on it. His lips set in a thin line, he grabs his jacket off the chair and shrugs it on, looking around at the rest of us. “Here’s the gameplan. Me and Dean’ll go get the supplies for that ritual. From what I remember, some of ‘em might be a little tough to find. Elpis, you put Spencer back in the driver’s seat. Brendon, I want you and Spence to take the Mustang, go to the nearest liquor store and get a bottle of the best Scotch you can lay hands on. Sam, you hold down the fort here. We clear?”  
  
“Uh, I’m clear on everything except the part where you’re going to invite the  _Lord of the Underworld_  over for a glass of Scotch,” I say flatly, but I don’t press the issue too much. For the first time since he came back, Ryan looks a little more alive, something sparking in his eyes and adding purpose to his movements. He simply works better when he can think like a soldier, and I won’t take that away from him.  
  
“Just trust me, Bren. I got a plan.” Okay. I do. I trust him. Against every force of better judgment I have left in me, I trust him. Ryan presses the keys to the Mustang into my palm and gives my hand a squeeze before he and Dean disappear down the hallway and out the front door. I trust him.  
  
“Ugh, it’s like gettin’ carsick. Gotta learn to make those transitions smoother, lady,” Spencer groans behind me, throwing the rest of the dishes in the sink before grabbing a tan Carhartt jacket that must be his off of one of the other chairs. “I think there’s a liquor store somewhere close to downtown. You wanna hit the road?”  
  
“Huh? Yeah, sure,” I mutter, feeling the ridges of the keys dig into my hand.  
  
I trust him. I trust him. He’s a fucking idiot, but I trust him.

* * *

Two hours later, Spencer and I are rolling back towards Sierra’s neighborhood with Black Sabbath blasting through the speakers and a bottle of Glen Garioch Founders Reserve nestled between Spencer’s feet. Despite the death threat he gave me yesterday, he’s a pretty cool guy. He likes classic rock and Clint Eastwood movies, and after a bit of prying and a big drink out of the bottle of Scotch, he admits to having a pretty extensive collection of Legos back home. He’s got an easygoing personality and a quick, snappy sense of humor. I can see why he’s someone Ryan would pick as a best friend. I haven’t really gotten to see them work together, but they seem like they’d balance each other perfectly.  
  
He’s telling me stories about when he and Ryan were kids as we turn down Sierra’s street, both of us laughing at his recount of the time Ryan fell off Spencer’s uncle’s shrimp boat out in the gulf and had to be hauled back in with a net. Wiping tears of mirth from the corner of his eye, he turns around and looks at me speculatively. “Y’know, I think you’ll be good for him.”  
  
“Why’s that?” I ask.  
  
“You know how to laugh. Hell, kid, anyone who can be in the shit sandwich you are and can still laugh has to be an all-right guy. We both know that Ryan ain’t exactly a chuckle bucket in his own right, but he looks happier around you than I seen him in years. So yeah, y’all have my blessin’s.”  
  
Grinning over at him, I give a quick nod of gratitude, not really sure why the approval means as much as it does. “Thanks.”  
  
I’m so preoccupied that I completely forget about the giant pothole fifty yards from Sierra’s driveway.  
  
I swerve as fast as I can, but one of the back wheels hits the dip in the pavement at full speed, the impact jarring through the Mustang’s body with an almighty clatter, the grating sound of metal on pavement reverberating in my teeth. Spencer’s yelling and I’m cursing as I slam on the brake, creating a long black smear of burnt rubber on the road right in front of Sierra’s driveway. Five seconds pass in silence, both of us breathing heavily.  
  
“It’s okay,” Spencer pants, clutching the bottle of Garioch to his chest like a newborn. “It’s all good. I was able to save the Scotch.”  
  
“All right, cool,” I respond shakily, shifting down a few gears and hitting the gas again. That horrible scraping sound rises back up through the chassis, and I immediately punch the brakes, eyes wide. “What the hell was that?”  
  
“Just pull in the driveway, man, no use sittin’ out here.”  
  
The fifteen or twenty feet I have to drive to pull into the house is the most excruciating distance I’ve ever crossed. As soon as I put the car in park, I’m scrambling out of my seatbelt and yanking the keys out of the ignition, sprinting around the side of the car, and -  
  
“Oh, fuck  _me_ ,” I whisper, not even realizing the irony in whose favorite catchphrase I’ve subconsciously adopted. the back of the muffler must have caught on the edge of that pothole, drug along as I tried to swerve out of the way. The Mustang’s entire exhaust system is now dragging the ground, held in place by one small metal bracket near the front of the car.  
  
“Bye,” Spencer says hurriedly, heading for the front door in an all-out sprint and leaving me to stand alone with my handiwork. The Impala isn’t in the driveway, Ryan’s not back yet, but in perfect timing, I get a little buzz on my phone from him that says he and Dean are almost here.  
  
I wonder if this is how death row inmates feel.  
  
Eyes wide, I wander up to the house, refusing to look back at the car. It feels like everything is passing me by in a dream state, but I know better than to think that, breezing past Sam in the hallway and turning the corner into the living room. Spencer’s standing in there, wide-eyed and still clutching the Scotch, which I grab from him and take a long swig right from the bottle. “M-maybe… Maybe he won’t notice. I mean, he’s tired. He’s preoccupied. Maybe we can go out tonight and do something.”  
  
Right on cue, the rumbling purr of the Impala’s engine pulls up into the driveway. Moments pass in terrified silence until Dean comes strolling through the front door, a big brown paper bag in his hands. “So what kind of Scotch did you guys -”  
  
 _“WHAT THE EVER-LOVIN’ **FUCK**  HAPPENED TO MY FUCKIN’ CAR?!”_  
  
“Oh, yeah, about that,” Dean says with a grimace, looking over at me. “May God have mercy on your soul, Brendon, because Ryan sure won’t.”  
  
Well, according to Castiel, God’s MIA, so that means the number of my potential set of mercy-providers is zero.  
  
In some small amount of providence, Ryan keeps his raging outside, a steady stream of yelling and colorful profanity that probably isn’t making the neighbors very happy. Dean immediately starts up work on whatever ritual it is that we’re supposed to be doing, drawing weird looking symbols and pentagrams all over the floor and throwing all kinds of herbs and stuff into a big metal bowl. I can hear Ryan go banging into the garage and rummage around for a second before leaving again, still spouting a stream of muffled cursing as the sound of metal on metal rises up from the driveway.  
  
We’re in here summoning the king of Hell, and he’s fixing his car. Yeah, sounds about right.  
  
I wait for the sound of him yelling to stop before I look up at Sam, Dean, and Spencer. “I should go out and apologize.”  
  
“You got a death wish, kid?” Spencer says idly, sitting on the couch beside Sam and helping tie herbs into bundles with some red thread.  
  
“No, but I still need to tell him I’m sorry. I mean, that car’s his baby and he’s dealt with enough shit lately, I feel bad…”  
  
“What you’re gonna feel is the sensation of Ryan Ross bitin' your goddamn head clean off your shoulders if you stick it out that door,” replies Spencer, chucking a bundle into the bowl and picking up another clump of herbs. “But it’s your funeral, brother. I ain’t gonna stop you.”  
  
And he doesn’t. I walk out the front door cautiously, closing it behind me without a sound and tiptoeing off the porch. Ryan must have found tools and a glider in the garage, because I can see his feet sticking out from under the rear bumper, hear his grumbling bouncing off the metal of the undercarriage.  
  
“I am  _so_  sorry,” I offer softly. That’s all it takes for him to reappear, sliding into view with a disenchanted expression and a few dirty spots on his shirt, hands smeared black.  
  
“Ain’t a big deal,” he shrugs, wiping his hands on his jeans and reaching for an open bottle of beer next to the back wheel that he must have gotten out of the spare fridge in the garage. “All it took to fix it were some temporary fastenin’s, I’ll stop at Autozone or something and get some real ones later.”  
  
“No, I should have been watching where I was going, I mean I knew the pothole was there -”  
  
Ryan rolls his eyes and gets to his feet, leaning against the passenger’s side. “Bren, I knew the hangers on the exhaust were rusted out before we left Chicago. It’s my own damn fault for not changin’ ‘em. Relax.”  
  
But I’ve worked my way into a frenzy now, my voice climbing higher in pitch and faster in speech rate as apologies for things that aren’t even related to the car start to spill over my lips. “But it was your  _car_  and I should have been more careful and I should have been looking, Ryan, I’m so fucking sorry. I was just preoccupied because of last night, and I’m sorry for that, too. I was being a selfish dick and freaking out about my own problems instead of worrying about you and you  _needed me_  and all I could do was sit there and then today I fucked up your car, I’m so sorry, oh my God, I’m sorry -”  
  
“Brendon,  _stop it._ ” His hands are attached to the sides of my face in a split second, forehead pressed to mine just like that night in the alley in Chicago. I can see the different shades of purple-blue-gray in the shadows beneath his eyes from here, see the matte November daylight overhead light his irises up until they’re something more than their usual whiskey color, something multi-faceted, precious amber in a museum, kerosene right after the flame catches. Ryan’s fingers press insistently against the hinge of my jaw, his grip so tight that my head shakes a bit when he moves closer, his face all knit up in something that looks like irritation. “Stop it, okay?!  _I love you._ ”  
  
The words hit me so hard that I can’t breathe, the impact slamming right into the center of my chest. I feel like I’ve met the same fate as the Mustang, my foundation ripped right out from under me in a jarring crash, leaving me to spin out of control, directionless as I try to slam on the brakes. My mouth moves soundlessly, the heated ache behind my sternum stealing my voice.  
  
Yesterday, I thought to myself that Ryan had already told me in action what he never would in words, and here he’s proved me so, so wrong.  
  
Ryan notes my silence, and I don’t know what he takes it for, but I’d be willing to bet he sees it in a negative light. I can almost see the physical way he tries to take it back, his hands falling away from my face and hovering there like he could snatch the words out of the air and shove them back where they came from. He takes two steps backwards, out of my personal space, and I try to reach for him, but he jerks evasively away from the potential contact. Here we are. Square One all over again. There’s an almost audible sound of his walls reconstructing, bricks and mortar morphing into a heartbeat-blur as he tries to cover up those raw, bleeding wounds of words that he just exposed to the light of day. It’s the same old song and dance, jaw tightening, eyes hardening, a military sharpness to his movements as he turns on his heel and heads for the front door. “C’mon. Let’s get this over with. I’ve never met Crowley, but Dean says he’s a real asshole.”  
  
“Ryan -”  
  
“Don’t.” He cuts me off before I even have time to formulate what I was going to say, turning around and looking so bone-deep hurt that I shrink back a few steps, not wanting to touch some damaged part of him that might make it worse. “Just don’t, Bren. Forget it.”  
  
Never.  
  
The others have got everything set up by the time we walk through the door. It looks like the setup from some sort of tacky old-school horror movie, a big red pentagram drawn on the hardwood of Sierra’s floor with what looks like tempera paint, smaller symbols inside of it, the metal bowl the centerpiece of it all.  
  
“Is this for real?” I ask uncertainly, standing in the doorway while Ryan shoves past me, lighting a cigarette and nodding in apparent approval of the setup.  
  
“All right, who’s doing the honors?” Dean says apprehensively, twirling a wicked-looking knife back and forth between the fingers of one hand, a wad of gauze in the other.  
  
My eyes go round as dinner plates. “Holy shit, we’re not like… sacrificing anything, are we?”  
  
“Blood of the summoner’s an ingredient in the ritual,” Sam explains, setting the bottle of Scotch and a handful of glasses on the coffee table. “Nothing has to die, but you have to put forth a pretty good-sized amount.”  
  
“This whole shitstorm was my plan. I got it,” Ryan mutters gruffly, rolling up his sleeve and taking the knife from Dean.  
  
“Ry, don’t -” I start, but before I can even take a step toward him, he’s opened up a fairly large gash across his forearm, a stream of blood welling up quickly and dripping down into the bowl. He clenches his fist in an effort to make the flow faster, a flicker of discomfort ghosting across his face as he exhales around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and looks up at Dean.  
  
“That enough?”  
  
“Should be, yeah.”  
  
“Holy shit, that thing was sharper’n I thought,” Ryan winces, handing the knife back to Dean in exchange for the gauze, pressing the white bandages over the cut and hissing out a few curses under his breath. “Everyone ready?”  
  
“Ready as we’re gonna get,” Spencer shrugs, fiddling with the cap on the bottle of Scotch.  
  
Ryan doesn’t even turn around to acknowledge me. “Brendon, go upstairs.”  
  
“Fuck you, I’m staying here. You can’t make me -”  
  
 _“Now!”_  
  
Grumbling mutinously, I stomp out of the living room and halfway up the stairs, stepping in place to make it sound like I’ve gone all the way up. If I crouch in a certain way, I can see around the wall and through the railing, a decent view of the living room where someone would only be able to see me if they were looking for me specifically. Ryan’s back is to me, but I can still hear him clearly, reading something in Latin off a piece of paper that Dean hands him before looking up at the others. “Here we go.”  
  
He flicks his cigarette into the metal bowl, and the whole thing explodes upwards, a bright light that reminds me of the time my high school Chem teacher set a coil of Magnesium on fire. I shut my eyes against the sudden onslaught, blinking spots from in front of them and trying to quell the headache I know will come as a result of watching the explosion head-on. When my vision finally clears, I blink a few more times just to be certain I’m not seeing things. Where there was once just the metal bowl, there now stands a squat, middle-aged guy in a business suit. A little bit of scruff, a razored smirk, clever, sharp eyes. Kind of reminds me of a used-car salesman that might have taken up serial murder as a side hobby. I know I can’t be seen, but a disbelieving whisper still slips out. “What the  _hell?_ ”  
  
The guy - I’m guessing this is Crowley - looks back and forth between Dean and Sam with an irritated glare before his eyes settle on Ryan, at which point he breaks into the most dangerous-looking smile I’ve ever seen. “Hello, boys.”  
  
What the hell, indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 'I love you' scene was suggested to me by my dear friend Sara (deadkenndies). This chapter is dedicated to her, for always letting me bounce ideas off of her, and for being the Dean to my Ryan. Bless you, babygirl.


	15. Chapter 14 - Ryan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING, CHILDREN: HERE THERE BE SMUT.

“Crowley, I’m guessin’,” I say guardedly,looking around and noting the stressed expressions on Dean and Sam’s faces, the vague apprehensiveness on Spencer’s.  
  
“The one and only,” he nods with a smirk, a distinct English accent coloring his voice. Crowley raises an eyebrow almost boredly, glancing over at the Winchesters with a patronizing look. “Squirrel. Moose. You brought along a friend this time. And a delightfully Southern-fried one at that.”  
  
“You ain’t here to talk to Sam and Dean, you’re here to talk to me,” I snap, snatching the bottle of Scotch and a glass off the coffee table and filling it halfway, holding it out in Crowley’s direction. I’m careful not to let my foot cross the line of the devil’s trap, a lesson I learned the hard way when I dealt with my first demon six years ago. The bitch nearly ripped my arm off, and she didn’t have near the juice that I’m willing to bet the king of Hell himself has. “Have a drink.”  
  
“Oh, I like you already,” Crowley grins, grabbing the glass and giving me a gracious nod before taking a sip. “Hm, Garioch. Not my favorite, but it’ll do. Now, what can I do for you boys?”  
  
“It’s a little matter concernin’ Pandora’s Box.” Blunt, to the point. I’m not interested in this conversation taking any longer than it has to. I’m aware that demons are a little more morally gray than the standard black-and-white in which everyone else seems to view them, but I’m not all that invested in the nitty-gritty of the motivations of something I’ve been trained my whole life to kill indiscriminately. “And I know you have it, so don’t waste my time playin’ dumb.”  
  
His eyebrows shoot skyward, but he makes no effort to deny it. “Ridiculous demands aside, I’m very interested in finding out how you managed to know that I have the box.”  
  
“I told him,” Spencer says, voice shifting into something softer and more docile as his eyes flash silver.  
  
“Elpis, long time no see,” Crowley croons, smiling winningly. “Been a while since Athens, dearie. I’m loving the new meatsuit. Exploring your masculine side?”  
  
“We’re not here to make small talk, Crowley,” says Elpis in a distinctly curt tone, getting up from the couch and walking over to stand beside me. “I allowed you to have possession of the Pandora’s Box because I believed it would be safe in your hands from anyone who could do real damage with it, but circumstances have changed. We need the box.”  
  
“Why’s that, love?”  
  
“Because long story short, Atiria’s got a wild hair up her ass and is tryin’ to bring about the end of the world as we know it,” I answer before Elpis has the chance to open her mouth. Scowling, I pour a Scotch for myself and take a large sip, relishing the burn that travels down my throat and into my stomach. “Big prophecy, Oracle of Delphi, gates of the Netherworld gettin’ blasted to smithereens. Ring any bells?”  
  
Crowley’s grin widens, something feral and chaotic hovering just under the surface of his businesslike demeanor. “Oh, I haven’t seen the old broad in ages. How  _is_  Atiria?”  
  
“Batshit crazy and decidedly lethal.”  
  
“Same as ever, then,” he shrugs, taking another measured sip. “Figures. You know what they say about the nature of Evil being unchanging.”  
  
“Stop beating around the bush and tell him what he needs to know, Crowley,” Dean growls, shoving his hands in his pockets and glaring. “I’ve got holy water out in the trunk and I’m not afraid to use it.”  
  
“No need to be so hostile, Squirrel. I’m just catching up with some old friends.”  
  
“Catch up on your own time, you slimy son of a -”  
  
“Dean, please.” Elpis cuts him off, raising a hand. “Aggression won’t help anyone.”  
  
A moment of tense silence passes before Dean turns on his heel and stalks over to stand with Sam, grumbling. “Of all the celestial help we could’ve had, we had to get the one freakin’ ancient spirit that eats glitter and craps rainbows.”  
  
“So that’s your plan? Lock the old girl up again? Oh dear, she won’t like that,” Crowley muses, eyes fixed on Elpis with a knowing sort of smile. “But then again, your little schemes are never exactly what they seem at face value, are they, Elpis? It makes one wonder what gears you’ve got turning underneath all that pompous self-righteousness.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask sharply, whipping my head around to stare at Elpis incredulously.  
  
“It means that Crowley is a petulant child who would see you come to distrust the one source of aid you have left,” she replies smoothly, Spencer’s expression kept level in a way it never is when he’s in control of his own body. “And it means that as of now, you’re playing right into the game of something much bigger than you can understand. You seem to have a talent for that, Ryan.”  
  
I don’t like this. I’m in a situation where I’m entirely dependent on forces I don’t know or trust, and the entire thing puts me on edge. Dean and Sam are here, of course, but there’s only so much they can offer when we’re looking at the end of the world and a stage set with players as big as the embodiment of Evil itself. The hateful part of it all is that at the end of the day, I can’t even trust Spencer. The one person I’ve been able to rely on my entire life, and he’s been compromised by the fact that he’s got Elpis riding shotgun in his head. Effectively, I’m staring this thing down alone. The one person I can trust unconditionally is upstairs waiting on me to tell him what our next move is, and while I’m knocked off balance without him beside me, it needs to stay that way for now. My job is to keep Brendon out of this shitstorm as much as I possibly can, and if that means sacrificing my own sense of well-being… well, it won’t be the first time I’ve done so.  
  
“Let’s go ahead and assume that I don’t trust any of y’all as far as I can throw you and go from there,” I mumble darkly, downing the rest of my Scotch in one gulp and sitting the empty glass back on the table with a hollow thud.  
  
“Good policy,” Dean nods, still looking pissed off and completely ignoring the disapproving stare Elpis shoots in his direction.  
  
“Trouble on the home front. Lovely,” Crowley sighs, rolling his eyes and swirling the Scotch around in his glass. “But none of this really explains what I’m doing here. Honestly, you can’t expect me to just  _give_  you the box. I went to extensive measures to get my hands on the damn thing. I’m not just going to hand it over to the first misguided bumpkin that calls me up asking for an unwarranted favor.”  
  
“That’s exactly what you’re gonna do.” As much as Elpis preached about aggression not getting anyone anywhere, I’ve got twenty-four years of experience that tells me the exact opposite. I round on Crowley with a glare, pacing around the perimeter of the devil’s trap and crossing my arms. “We’re gonna lock Atiria up until we can figure out something better to do with her, and you’re gonna help us.”  
  
“I’m interested. Tell me why you think I’m going to help you,” Crowley smirks, toying with the glass of Scotch in his hand and fixing me with an infuriating smirk.  
  
“Because you don’t want the gates of Hell blown open any more than we do,” I counter.  
  
“And why’s that, Jethro?”  
  
“It’s Ryan, actually,” I say in my most even tone, despite the fact that I’m running through about ten different ways to rip his tongue out in my head. “And you don’t want the gates of Hell open because it’d jeopardise your position. You’re supposedly the head honcho downstairs, right?”  
  
“I am,” he snorts, smirking around a measured sip from Sierra’s detergent-spotted glass. “And one would think it would earn me a bit of respect from snot-nosed brats like you lot.”  
  
“So, you call the shots,” I keep pressing, making a solid effort not to roll my eyes. “My bet is, you have final say on who does and doesn’t get to go topside. Gates of Hell get blown, and you lose that authority. It’s a free-for-all. You lose your power, and you get anarchy. And I don’t know about you, but anarchy sounds like the one thing I wouldn’t want to deal with as lord over a realm of damned souls.”  
  
I can’t tell if the impressed look on Crowley’s face is genuine or meant to mock me. “Well, color me surprised. You’re actually intelligent despite talking like you just walked off the set of Deliverance. West Virginia, Mountain Mama, eh?”  
  
“I’m from Alabama,” I snap irritably.  
  
“Squeal like a pig, boy,” Crowley grins.  
  
“Dean, go get the holy water.”  
  
“Hunters. Couldn’t take a joke if your miserable lives depended on it.” Fixing me with an expression that’s caught somewhere between annoyance and disappointment, Crowley polishes off his Scotch and waves the empty glass in my direction, waiting for me to refill it before continuing. “At any rate, I can’t very well just hand the box over now, even if I felt like it, which, for the record, I don’t. I don’t keep the bloody thing on me like car keys.”  
  
“So we cut you loose, you run home and grab the box and bring it back to us,” Sam says with a shrug, the first time he’s spoken during this whole ordeal. “Ryan’s making a valid point, Crowley. You’re a businessman. Look at this from that perspective. You can’t afford for Atiria to blow those gates any more than we can.”  
  
“Yes, yes, Moose, we’re all impressed by your scintillating analytical skills.” Crowley waves Sam off like a bothersome fly, turning back around to look at me. “Hunting on par with the Winchesters, taking on an Apocalypse singlehandedly, no manners, terrible accent. You’re one of those Summerdale boys. Your surname wouldn’t happen to be Ross, would it?”  
  
“Who’s askin’?” I bite back defensively.  
  
“I am, you impudent little whelp!” For the briefest second, Crowley loses his cool, a distant rumble of thunder leaking into his voice. “Your people aren’t exactly my favorite, even among hunters. You and Papa Dearest took out one of my best sales associates a few years back.”  
  
“She was makin’ deals with kids on an elementary school playground who had no idea what they were signin’ up for,” I snarl, remembering the case all too well. In fact, it was the same one that taught me to be careful with devil’s traps. “Pretty shady business practice, if you ask me.”  
  
“I  _don’t_  ask you.” We stare each other down for a long time, a tense silence settling over the living room before Crowley sighs and takes another drink. “At any rate, bygones are bygones, and I still don’t have the box with me. Catch twenty-two, Jethro.”  
  
“Ryan.”  
  
“Whatever.”  
  
“So what’s our resolution?” Sam asks, looking back and forth between Crowley and I. “As much as the idea of compromising with you makes my skin crawl, there’s got to be some sort of mutually beneficial agreement we can come to.”  
  
“Oh, I can think of a few options,” Crowley grins unsettlingly, eyes still fixed unblinkingly on me. “You’re right, of course. The Gates blowing won’t go well for operations downstairs, and I’ve always thought Atiria was a psychotic bint, anyway. So I’m going to give you two choices, Jethro."  
  
 _"Ryan."_  
  
"Close enough. Option one: I’ve got the box hidden in a very obscure, very dangerous location. I give you the general layout of said location, and you go fetch it yourself.”  
  
No good. Winter Solstice is in less than a month, and I don’t have time to go globetrotting after some stupid jewelry box that I may or may not survive long enough to lay hands on. “What’s option two?”  
  
“Option two is chock full of irony, in special honor of the collateral damage you cost me six years ago,” says Crowley, examining his nails like he’s got a whole list of better things to do than stand here and talk to me. “Standard crossroads deal. You sign your soul over, I pop off for a few minutes and deliver the box to your doorstep before the hour is out. I’ll even give you the full ten years before collection, just because I’m feeling gracious.”  
  
“You don’t want my soul.”  
  
“Oh, but I do. The damaged ones are always the best. Adds character.”  
  
I purse my lips, flexing the hand I injured punching the mirror a few days ago and letting the ache of it ground me. Back in Chicago before this whole mess blew up in our faces, Dean told me that I had to make a choice, had to decide whether it was me or Brendon who would walk out of this alive. I made that choice without a second thought, but now the time’s finally come where I have to act on it. “And it’s a contract, right? You go back on your end and the deal’s null and void?”  
  
Dean gapes at me. “Ryan, you’re not seriously thinking of doing this.”  
  
“Shut up, Dean,” I growl, fists clenched at my side. “This could be our only shot, okay, you don’t get it.”  
  
“Oh,  _I don’t get it,_  okay!” he half-shouts, storming over until he’s a few inches too far into my personal space. I blame Cas for making him pick up the habit. “Yeah, I don’t get it at all, dude, I’m totally talking out of my ass here. Newsflash, Ross:  _I’ve been to Hell._  And trust me, no stupid box is worth what’s waiting for you down there. We’ll find some other way.”  
  
“You’re the one who told me to make a decision. This is me livin’ up to it.” Surprisingly, my voice is steady and calm. Dean seems taken aback by that, staring at me before sighing resignedly and cursing under his breath as I turn back to Crowley. “My soul for the box. Deal. Where do I sign?”  
  
“Don’t you fucking  _dare_ , Ryan!”  
  
Brendon comes crashing into the living room like a tiny, dark-haired hurricane, eyes blazing, face pale and livid. Jaw clenching, I turn around slowly and fix him with the most poisonous glare I can muster. “I told you to wait upstairs.”  
  
“Oh, hello. Who’s this?” Crowley says, looking confusedly between me and Brendon.  
  
“You’re not selling your goddamned  _soul_  for the box!” Brendon practically rages, completely ignoring Crowley and matching me glare for glare. “I’m not letting you do that!”  
  
“It ain’t your call!” I bite in response, refusing to back down. “It’s the best chance we got, Brendon. Hell, in ten years, I’ll be thirty-four. That’s way past the life expectancy for hunters. Odds are I’ll be dead in ten years anyway.”  
  
“Oh, and the fact that you’d be condemning your soul to Hell doesn’t bother you?!”  
  
“LIKE I AIN’T HEADED THERE ANYWAY.” The shout tugs painfully at my throat and rattles the room, leaving splintered silence in its wake. And there it is. The ugly, naked truth. I’ve always known what road I was on. When I chalk up all the lives I’ve taken, all the lives I wasn’t able to save, all the moral ambiguity and heartbreak and downright nastiness I’ve put out into the world, there’s no way I’m getting within a hundred miles of the pearly gates. I accepted it a long time ago. Ten years and a fate I’ve been working up to all my life in exchange for Brendon’s safety? Hell yeah, I’ll take it.  
  
Brendon, however, isn’t hearing any of that. No, in his typical stubborn-ass fashion, he’s right back up in my face, yelling harshly enough to give me a run for my money. “Just because you romanticize the fuck out of self-sacrifice doesn’t mean that it’s your only option, you asshole! You’re worth more than that, Ryan, and I don’t care if you don’t see it, because  _I’m not letting you die for me!_ ”  
  
And suddenly, the lights go out.  
  
More accurately, the lights  _explode_. Every single lightbulb in the room blazes, humming with electricity before shattering into a snowstorm of glass shards that tinkle almost musically as they hit the hardwood floor. Dean yelps and dodges out of the way of a hail of sharp glass. Sam looks unsettled and confused, brushing a few shards out of his hair. Crowley looks vaguely interested for the first time since he popped into the room.  
  
Brendon, for his part, is still seething, apparently oblivious to what happened until he sees me looking around, turning back to him with a disbelieving look on my face. “Did you just…”  
  
“I… I don’t know,” he stammers, gaping up at an empty socket and then lowering his head to look at me, his eyes round as dinner plates and swimming with fear. “God, I was so mad that I just felt like there was this electricity in my veins, and then it all just blew up, and…”  
  
“Well I’ll be damned,” I whisper, reaching up and running my hand beneath the shattered bulb over my head, feeling the heat still radiating from it. “Cas wasn’t shittin’ you about those powers.”  
  
Brendon blinks at me for a moment, looking conflicted, like he’s trying to decide whether to believe me or not. “No. The house just blew a fuse or something, there’s no way.”  
  
“A fuse blowin’ that turns six or seven lightbulbs into confetti? Nah, kid. You’ve got mojo.” Good, this is good. He’s got something more pressing to focus on now. I reach down to the coffee table and pick up my empty glass again, refilling it more than I should. I’m resolute in my decision, but a little liquid bravery would certainly help a bit. Brendon’s mumbling under his breath and staring up at the broken lights as I turn back to Crowley. “You were sayin’?”  
  
“So, Squirt over there has mysteriously manifesting powers, you’re going to great lengths to keep him out of the way, and you’re willing to toss your soul about frivolously in the name of getting the job done,” he hums contemplatively, mulling it over before something clicks in his brain and he bursts out into peals of laughter, doubling over and slapping his knee. “Oh, this is  _rich_. You two?  _Really?_  A scrawny hick with an attitude problem and a hyperactive midget who can do magic tricks. The human race has nothing to worry about with such valiant warriors as their defenders. Atiria won’t know what hit her.”  
  
“Ain’t really your problem, is it? You hand over the box, and then you’re out of the equation,” I scowl at him, shrugging flippantly. “So draw up the contract and let’s get this over with.”  
  
“Dammit, I told you that you’re not doing this! Forget it!” Brendon snaps as if on cue, his attention drawn completely away from the mystery of the exploding lights.  
  
I exhale slowly, fingers twitching for a cigarette and the beginnings of a headache starting to swim through my skull. “Stay outta this, Brendon.”  
  
“No, I  _won’t_  stay out of it! We’re in this together! If this whole stupid plan of yours is an effort to save me, then I’d better get to have some fucking say in it!”  
  
Some invisible force rips the glass of Scotch out of my hand, flinging it against the wall with a sharp-edged splatter. I look wide-eyed at the stain slowly creeping down the wall, breath caught in my throat as my composure slowly returns. “Can you stop gettin’ so pissy with me? You’re makin’ a mess.”  
  
I make a mental note to never pick a fight with Brendon again. If this is just the beginning of what he’ll supposedly be able to do, I won’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.  
  
He lets out a strangled sound of frustration, crossing in front of me and grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me slightly in some attempt to rattle sense into me. “I’ll stop being mad when you stop trying to throw your life away as some form of misguided self-punishment. Is this about Pete and Patrick?”  
  
“It’s about everyone! Pete, Patrick, Z, all the people that’ve died ‘cause of me!” There’s something raw and vulnerable scraping along the edges of my voice, brought on by the alcohol and made worse by the fact that I was never great at keeping things from him to begin with. “Goddammit, Bren, I’ve never been able to save anyone. I’ve got this shot to save you, and that’s probably the most important shot I’ve ever had. Are you really gonna stop me from takin’ it?”  
  
“If letting you take it means losing you, then yes. Yes, I am.” He says it without the slightest space for thought, his features set in hard, determined planes. I can feel the awkward stares from Dean and Sam, who have no idea what’s going on, the half-panicked look from Elpis, who knows exactly what’s going on. Brendon doesn’t seem to notice any of it, eyes fixed on me with an intensity that makes me squirm internally. I hate it, how he knows every motivation before I do, how he’s in my head now, how he’s in every cell of me. I hate it. I hate it. I love it. I hate it. “And you’re not thinking clearly, Ryan. Prophecy. You go, I go. You get dragged to Hell in ten years, then so do I. Is that what you want?”  
  
What I  _want_  is to believe that the prophecy only works one way, that if Brendon were to keel over dead then so would I, but not the other way around. It’s easy enough to imagine Brendon living in a world without me. He’d keep hunting, keep using that effortless charisma to make new contacts, maybe find a new partner. Maybe he’d be a little more bitter and cynical for all he’d lost, but that happens to everyone in this life eventually. It would be possible for him to exist without me. Not easy, but possible. When I try to think of it from the opposite perspective, I just… can’t. Any imagined scenario I try to cook up of a life where I let Brendon die is just a blank slate. I reject the possibility so much that my brain refuses to even let me think of it hypothetically. I want to believe that the prophecy works in the way that’s best for us, but I’ve been dealing with it for too long to become invested in that belief. I can’t run the risk.  
  
“No,” I breathe out shakily, feeling the last shot I had miss the target and go whizzing off into the open air. My stomach clenches, feeling sour and sick with the loss. Once again, I’m staring down the Apocalypse with nothing. My cards are on the table, and I’ve been dealt the shittiest hand possible.  
  
Behind Brendon’s back, Crowley pulls a disgusted face, wrinkling his nose like he’s just smelled something awful. “Gracious, the reek of codependency is almost as thick on you two as it is on Moose and Squirrel.”  
  
“Yeah, well,” I grumble, not even making an effort to deny it. No real point in it anyway, not when it’s so blatantly obvious. “Looks like you’re out a soul, Crowley. We’ll take door number one.”  
  
“Well, that’s no fun at all,” he says with a sigh, finishing his second drink and looking back and forth between Brendon and I like he’s trying to pick up on something. “All right, then. Squirt is obviously the Sacred Vessel, which means he’ll be able to put the stupid tart back in the box. Fair warning, though, it won’t be easy to get. I hid it well.”  
  
“What’s the point in hiding an empty box?” Sam asks curiously, his head tilting a bit to the side. “Isn’t that what you said, Elpis? Everything bad had already escaped. It wasn’t dangerous. Just a collector’s item.”  
  
“Not dangerous if you’re not  _important_ , Moose, which I happen to be,” Crowley smirks over at him, pacing back and forth across the area of the devil’s trap where he’s able to move freely. “That little trinket is the most powerful prison in all of Creation, and it won’t only hold Atiria. Right spell, and you can throw anything in there. Unfortunately, after I bought the box, I realized that I fell under the category of  _anything_. Obviously, nothing I tried to do to destroy it worked. So I hid it. Put it somewhere out of the way, left it guarded, decided to never touch it again.”  
  
“All right, where’s it at?” I sigh, carding a hand through my hair and already not liking the sound of this.  
  
“Answer to that one’s complicated, Jethro.”  
  
“Make it simple.”  
  
The smile that stretches across Crowley’s face is nothing short of unsettling. “It’s on the astral plane.”  
  
A second of silence. Two. A defeated groan rises up from my chest, a hand coming up to cover my eyes. “Fuck  _me_.”  
  
“Wait, I don’t get it. What’s he talking about? What does it mean?” Brendon says, picking up on my desperation and starting to look a little scared himself.  
  
“It means the box ain’t even technically on Earth.”  
  
“What?!”  
  
“The astral plane is sometimes referred to as the spiritual realm, Brendon,” Elpis explains much more eloquently than I could have, eyes flashing silver and voice serene. “There are certain people who can traverse this plane in their dreams, a process known as astral projection. Many psychics are capable of it. However, the astral plane is vast. Some might say infinite. Finding the box there won’t be easy.”  
  
“Well, easier than you’re thinking,” Crowley throws in with a halfhearted shrug. “Not easy, mind you, but easier. I was able to track down a portal in the Rocky Mountains after I bought the box, stashed it right inside with some wards around it, left the portal guarded. You find the portal, you find the box.”  
  
“Awesome. That’s doable. Gimme the coordinates and we’ll get goin’,” I say, perking up instantly. Hell, if that’s all we have to do, I’m glad I didn’t sign my soul over.  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
My jaw drops. “The hell d’you mean, you don’t know?”  
  
“I mean I don’t know exactly where it is, Jethro, get with the program!” Crowley snaps, looking irritated. “GPS wasn’t a thing in 1950. And besides, I wasn’t interested in ever going back to get the box. I wanted it to stay hidden. Why would I make note of its exact location? Counterproductive. All I know is that it’s somewhere in a cave in the Rockies, heavily guarded. The rest is up to you.”  
  
“So our search area is… the entire fuckin’ mountain range?” I ask numbly.  
  
“Effectively, yes. Still want to make that deal?”  
  
 _“No.”_  Brendon snaps, glaring at Crowley with a murderous expression before whipping back around to look over my shoulder. “Elpis?”  
  
“Once we get close enough, I will be able to sense the box’s presence, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says, nodding in response to a question that was never spoken. “But I’m not sure how close I have to be. In the past, I could sense it from several miles away, but there’s no definitive measure.”  
  
“And there’s the little part about ‘heavily guarded’ that you’re all ignoring. Demons. Hellhounds. All that crap,” Dean mutters, scuffing the toe of his boot against the floorboards. “And I bet after sixty years they’re not exactly friendly with strangers.”  
  
“So?” I ask, chancing a quick look over at Brendon to make sure he isn’t balking. To his credit, he looks much braver than I feel. I look back at Crowley, raising an eyebrow. “Anything watching the portal is obviously employed by you. Why not just call ‘em off?”  
  
“Because it’ll be more fun to watch you boys scramble for your lives.” He offers us all the definition of a shit-eating grin, sitting his empty glass back on the table. “Now, can I go? I’ve got some business to attend to, and you’ve got what you brought me here for.”  
  
“Whole lotta help you were,” I hiss, rubbing at the outer border of the devil’s trap with my foot until there’s a clean line through the red paint. “Go on, get.”  
  
He pauses for a moment, giving me and Brendon that same pensive look. “Jethro and Squirt. I have the horrible feeling that I’m going to be seeing more of you two in the future. Best of luck, boys. Tell Atiria I send my love.”  
  
By the time I blink, Crowley’s gone. Tremors start to shoot up my spine, and I collapse into the couch, burying my face in my hands. “Fuck.  _Fuck_ , this is impossible.”  
  
“Not impossible. Just… highly improbable,” Sam offers in a way he probably thinks is helpful, but he shuts up under the onslaught of the withering look I send his way.  
  
“Well, this is your game plan now, man. Nothing to do but keep going with it,” Dean shrugs, grabbing the Scotch off the table and taking a slug right out of the bottle.  
  
“I can go and begin searching now. Call Spencer’s cell phone when you’ve formulated a plan and I’ll meet you,” says Elpis, and in a flash, Spencer is nowhere to be found, an empty spot in the doorway. Like I needed that right now.  
  
“All right. All right, yeah,” I mutter, clenching my hands in my lap to keep them from visibly shaking and staring blankly ahead. “Set up a base in Denver, lay out a grid from there. Spend a couple days pokin’ around each area, see if Elpis picks anything up. All right. We’ll need to make a huge-ass Cabela’s run, tents, sleepin’ bags, freeze-dried food, all that shit. I think there’s one outside of Denver, and if we leave now we can -”  
  
“Woah, woah, chill out for a second.” Brendon interrupts me, clambering onto the couch beside me and staring me down. “You can’t drive to Denver like this, Ry, you’ll drive your car off a bridge or something. Just take some time to relax and get your head on straight -”  
  
“We ain’t  _got_  time, Brendon!” My throat feels constricted, ratcheting my voice up to a higher pitch and making it difficult to breathe. “Time is at the top of the very long list of shit we ain’t got! Christ, I’m fine, just let me go pack my stuff.”  
  
He grabs my shoulder as I try to get up, holding me down on the couch and looking at me analytically. “You’re working your way up to a fucking panic attack, Ryan. My sister-in-law had an anxiety disorder, okay, so I know what one looks like. You need to just take a few minutes and breathe before you try to come out guns blazing.”  
  
“I’m… fuck off, I’m perfectly stable,” I choke, batting his hand away and storming out of the living room before he has time to stop me. I go slamming into the bedroom but can’t remember what I came here for, rooted to the floor and feeling my entire body start to tremble. And I can’t breathe, I can’t move, I can’t think, I  _can’t_ …  
  
“Ry?” Of course he followed me upstairs. Brendon’s like a fucking dog with a bone when it comes to things like this. He only has to look at me for a second to see the state I’m in, sighs and ducks into the room. “Why is it so hard for you to give yourself the advantage once in a while, huh?”  
  
I don’t know. Is that what I’m doing? Putting myself at a disadvantage? I wasn’t aware of that. I thought I was just doing my level best to clean up my messes, fighting a traitorous body and mind that would have me shut down when I’m most needed. What, does he expect me to take a mental health day when the clock keeps on ticking and we have no idea what our next move is going to be? I’ve come to understand that Brendon is an idealist and an optimist and everything I’m not, but even he’s not that stupid. Grumbling something unintelligible under my breath, I force myself to move, yanking my duffel bag out from under the bed and starting to throw the clothes I’ve left lying around inside. Plaid shirt, old jeans, Pink Floyd t-shirt, that’s Brendon’s, don’t care. I grab the few extra clips of silver bullets I left on the dresser, tuck them into a side pocket of the bag. Maybe I can leave some stuff behind, get us on the road early and make it to Denver before the stores all close.  
  
Muttering my way down through a list of things we’ll need, I flip up the pillow on my side of the bed, grab the knife I keep there by force of habit. “You could help, y’know. Sierra and Blake have an arsenal down in the basement, we could raid it before we leave.”  
  
“We’re not leaving. You’re so out of it that you didn’t even notice me stealing your keys,” Brendon replies curtly, holding my keychain up between his thumb and forefinger and jingling it for reference.  
  
“Give ‘em back,” I snap, making a grab for the keys. Brendon jerks them away just as quickly. I chalk it up to me being stressed out and half-drunk, but the truth of it is that his reflexes are sharper and more honed than they were when I first met him. He’s changed in ways other than the new hardness behind his eyes and the widening of his already massive stubborn streak. Now that I’ve let myself look at him for extended periods of time, even his appearance has shifted. He’s built up more muscle, even though it’s lean and doesn’t add a lot of bulk to him. Still, I can feel the definitive outline of biceps that definitely weren’t visible before when my hand closes around the arm of his hoodie, yanking him around and trying again before he pulls away with some fancy evasive maneuver Pete must have taught him. “I’ll kick your ass, Brendon, don’t think I won’t. I ain’t in the mood for this shit.”  
  
“And neither am I,” he responds, dodging out of my way again with my keychain in a death grip. “You can wait one more day to dive into this headfirst. There’s no point in driving yourself insane.”  
  
“Short drive.”  
  
I manage to grab him around the waist, scrambling for the keys, but he elbows me right in the stomach and breaks out of my hold, glaring. “I’m not above kicking your ass, either. At least if I knocked you unconscious you’d get some sleep for once.”  
  
My eyes narrow. “Gimme my fuckin’ keys, Urie.”  
  
“No!”  
  
I dive at him with a strangled cry of outrage, knocking off his center of gravity and causing us to both hit the floor with a jarring thud. A muddle of cursing and halfhearted punches ensues, something that’s more like a middle school girl fight than an honest-to-God brawl. We roll around on the carpet, yelling and batting at each other, and it’s a full two minutes before I look up and realize that my keychain is lying forgotten on the carpet a few feet away. Letting out a premature laugh of victory, I dive forward, my hands closing around the keys.  
  
That is, until they fly upwards, out of my reach.  
  
“What the hell?!” I squawk, trying to grab them out of the air, but in response they lift a little higher, just out of the range of my fingers. I look over at Brendon, who’s laying on the floor with messy hair and a self-satisfied smirk, watching the keys intently. “Hey, no powers, you little shit! We settle this like men, dammit!”  
  
“All’s fair in love and war,” says Brendon breezily, keeping the keys hovering above me and shooting a pensive look over at the open window.  
  
“Don’t you dare,” I whisper warningly.  
  
The keychain goes flying out the window, landing in the gutter along the porch roof with an audible clatter.  
  
“You son of a bitch!” I shriek, clambering to my feet and running over to the window. There’s no way I can reach the gutter from here, don’t even know if Sierra and Blake owned a ladder that would let me go downstairs and climb up onto the roof to get it. The only viable option is climbing out the window, and that gets shot down as the same unseen force shuts the glass with a thud, holding it in place no matter how hard I try to push it open again. “What the actual fuck, Bren?!”  
  
“And now the only way for you to get your keys back is to wait for me to mojo them out of there,” he smirks, still panting from the physical exertion of the fight as he gets up, brushing off his clothes. “I think I’m getting good at this. It’s like when you were teaching me to shoot. All I had to do was get pissed off at you, and I improved.”  
  
“You threw my keys in the gutter,” I say mournfully, hands pressed against the window glass. The setting sun glints off the metal, shining alluringly, but I have a distinct feeling that me trying to crawl out the window won’t end well.  
  
“I did. I regret nothing.”  
  
“You’re damn well  _gonna_  regret it,” I growl, rounding on him, but I find that oddly enough, a lot of the anger has been sapped from me. It just seems like too much effort to do anything other than bluster at him, but bluster I will. “You don’t mess with a man’s car. That’s practically an unwritten law.”  
  
“I didn’t mess with your car, I messed with your keys.”  
  
“Semantics. Fuck you.”  
  
“I’m just trying to look out for you, Ry,” Brendon sighs, leaning against the door and running a hand through his hair, messing it up further. “You respond to tough love, so that’s what I’m giving you.”  
  
 _Oh, tough ‘love,’_  I think bitterly, the words clinging to the tip of my tongue, just barely held in.  _Yeah, give me love, go ahead. You forgot how the hell to do it when I spilled my guts all over the driveway and you just stared at me, letting that ‘I love you’ float off with no response._  
  
God, I didn’t even have time to let that sink in. I hadn’t really expected him to say it back, hadn’t expected myself to say it in the first place. So why did that silence cut through me like a new blade, open up wounds that hadn’t been touched for ages? I can’t figure it out. Maybe in a more stable mental state I could, but right now all I can feel is the lingering hurt of it, a stubborn ache in my chest that won’t fade away. The tremors start again. Shit, I still have so much to pack.  
  
“Just lay down.” Brendon sits down on the edge of the bed, twining his arms around my waist and pulling me down with him. Too out of it to fight back anymore, I give him what he wants and kick my shoes off, stretching out on top of the blankets, but I can't relax. Every tendon inside of me is wound bowstring-tight, on the verge of snapping and sending me spiralling into yet another nervous breakdown. My breath is starting to thin out into sharp, panicked wheezes, hitching up my throat and getting caught behind my teeth as I stare up at the ceiling. He sighs and sprawls out beside me, his hand settling on the side of my face, turning my head and forcing me to look at him. “Hey. Relax. Take a step back from this for five seconds before you give yourself an aneurysm.”  
  
“I’m a bit past steppin’ back from it,” I snap irritably, jerking away from the contact and pretending not to notice the flash of hurt that skates across Brendon’s face. “We got what, a little less than a month to find this thing, and how much ground to cover? It’s impossible, you gotta know that. There ain’t no way we can do it, and now it’s all gonna go up in smoke. You should’ve let me make that deal, Brendon. We could’ve been sittin’ here with the box in our hands right now, we could’ve -”  
  
“Ryan.” He cuts me off, voice firm and eyes determined as he props himself up on an elbow to glare down at me. “I wasn’t going to let you sign off your soul for the sake of convenience, okay? We’ll find the box. We’ve got the general location and Elpis to help us out. We’ll find it, but for now, I need you to keep calm, okay? There’s nothing constructive you can do in the middle an extended panic attack.”  
  
“Fuck you, I ain’t havin’ a panic attack,” I reply acidly, but by the time I finish speaking, Brendon’s palm is pressed flat against my chest, feeling my rabbit-paced heartbeat roaring against my ribcage and negating any lie I could have told. He fixes me with that penetrating, knowing look that’s always found a way to irritate the shit out of me, the one that chastisingly reminds me that there’s not a damn thing I can hide from him. Not anymore. Grumbling noncommittally, I roll over on my side and stare at the wall, cursing my heart for being traitorous in more ways than one.  
  
Still fighting to pull in air with my stress-constricted lungs, I don’t even have the strength to shove Brendon off when he curls up against my back, his arm twining around my waist as his body molds to mine. As angry and panicked as I am because of him, there’s still a certain comfort in his warmth, and I’ve leaned back into his touch before I can stop myself.  
  
He nuzzles into me, inhaling me deeply, kissing down my neck. “I need you to breathe, okay? You’re going to pass out.”  
  
“I’m fine,” I try to say, but  _fine_  comes out as a hoarse croak from a throat clenched tight with impending panic, adrenaline humming through my veins and winding me up even tighter in spite of the small part of me that relaxed at the feeling of his lips against my skin. My body goes listless and pliable for a second before the tension sinks back into my muscles, but that’s apparently enough to give Brendon ideas. In some untraceable moment, I’m suddenly on my back, Brendon’s knees bracketing my hips as he looks down at me with something caught between a smirk and a smile lingering on his lips. My eyes widen slightly and dart towards the mercifully closed door, mind whirring with visions of Dean and Sam milling around downstairs, ready to come up at any moment and ask us what the hell we were yelling about. Brendon leans down and presses his lips against the sharp hinge of my jaw, and my breath stutters for an entirely different reason, fingers carding arbitrarily through his hair. “I’m fine, I swear.”  
  
“Breathe,” he mutters before nibbling gently on my neck. All protestations forgotten, I arch into it, letting him do whatever he likes. There’s something to be said for it. Despite the fact that our problems are still there, nagging insistently at the forefront of my mind, a little bit of the tension falls away with every passing second. I feel my body begin to settle, my bones melting when he bites down on the sensitive skin a little harder this time, slowly working on making a mark.  
  
And I breathe. Hell, I _gasp._  
  
Almost of their own accord, my hands roam up and down his body, sliding effortlessly underneath his threadbare sweatshirt. And fuck,  _fuck_ , his skin is soft, so soft and so warm against my work-worn, winter-chilled hands that my palms tingle as I slide them into the dip of his lower back and press down, pulling him closer to me. Brendon smiles against my neck; I can feel the curvature of his lips stretch out across my skin before he bites down again, hard enough to pull a sharp hiss from between my teeth. Cheeky little bastard.  
  
I should shut this down now. I should get up and go downstairs, talk to Dean about our game plan and do something constructive,  _something_  that doesn’t involve being pinned to the mattress with Brendon’s thumbs hooked through my belt loops and the beginnings of a very troublesome erection pressing against the front of my jeans. Brendon notices, of course he does because I can’t get a fucking break, nipping at the fresh bruise he’s just made and grinding his hips down slowly. I let out a low, involuntary groan and my eyelids flutter shut, head falling back against the crisp white linen of the pillowcase. Even though I can’t see his smirk, I can feel it all the way down to the core of me.  
  
He’s got me exactly where he wants me. Always has. Always will.  
  
Our hips begin to move in a steady movement, gently rubbing back and forth, and this is it, this is the moment he was looking for that could make everything beyond the edge of this bed fall away into an unimportant haze. Nothing outside of this matters - all I can focus on is how smooth his vertebrae feel as I run my hands over them, the way the pads of my fingers fit seamlessly into the dimples just above the waistband of his jeans. Brendon’s lips leave a searing trail up my neck, the skin blazing long after he’s gone as he takes my earlobe between his teeth and tugs, breath hot and damp in my ear. My jaw clenches in a futile effort to bite back the moan that vibrates out from the center of my chest as my blunt nails rake across his back under his shirt. “Fuckin’ hell.”  
  
He pulls away from my neck, and my hands fly to the back of his head, pushing his lips against mine. Our mouths crash together ungracefully, but it works. I don’t care about the execution, couldn’t give a fiddler’s fuck about the semantics when there’s this awful, corrosive hunger roaring under my skin. It’s like a drug, insatiable and mind-numbing to the point that I’m strung out on him, craving the continuous fix of his taste and touch, chasing a high that only seems to get higher. Our tongues tangle up into something messy and careless, a small moan rising from the back of Brendon's throat as I reach down and grab his ass, grinding his pelvis closer to mine. And God, it’s perfect, every bit as nice as it was in the little mental rendezvous I told myself I was _not_  imagining, shadow-plays in my head of us doing something just like this that only saw recognition in dimly-lit motel bathrooms with him sleeping on the other side of the door, my teeth carving furrows into the back of my hand as I gasped my way back to a normal sense of composure and swore that I’d been thinking of something else. So much for that.  
  
Lust pools in my guts, burning my stomach, electrifying all of my senses as he shifts to bite down on my lower lip. Slowly, Brendon reaches for the buttons on my shirt, elegant fingers working dextrously to pull apart the worn flannel and gently brush against my undershirt. His warm hands slide inside when he's done, curiously traversing the mottled canvas of scars I've obtained over the years. Leaning in, he begins to leave a trail of kisses down my chest, stopping at the top of my pants.  
  
“Wh-what are you doin’?” The haze over my mind breaks just like that, a stabbing moment of clarity is I prop myself up on my elbows in a subtle attempt to shift him off me. There’s something about this that I can’t place, a point of no return that threatens to be crossed, and I don’t know what will happen once we’re on the other side. “We ain’t got the time for this, Brendon, there’s shit we gotta do, you don’t need to… y’know. Really.”  
  
“Stop thinking about taking care of me for one minute of your life. Just let me take care of  _you_  for once, okay?” he half-whispers, looking up at me with such genuine concern that the sudden break from his coy smirks and playful eyes takes me aback. Okay. Okay, if that’s what he wants, I won’t deny him. It’s been so long since someone’s taken care of me, since I  _let_  someone take care of me, I’m not even sure I remember how to go about that particular brand of vulnerability. The tension is starting to worm its way back into me, but I will it away, leaning back into the pillows and letting Brendon take this wherever he wants it to go.  
  
He leans down again, undoing my belt and jeans, pulling my pants and boxers in one swift motion, my hard cock now in plain view. A wave of heat washes across my cheekbones, but Brendon’s looking at me with something that looks almost like awe, his breath audibly hitching. I wait, I don’t know what for, for him to move, for him to say something. He finally manages some sort of articulation after a moment, his voice down an octave and pupils blown wide. “Holy shit.”  
  
I’m on the verge of making some sort of sarcastic remark, but before I can get the words out he’s got my cock in his hand, thumb brushing over the head, and everything in my brain fades out into blissful white noise.  
  
“I… oh my God,” Ineloquent and stammered, but it’s the best I can manage, teeth clenching until my entire jaw aches and fists tightening in the sheets. I should be thinking about the consequences, how this will only complicate things further or how Dean could just come strolling through the door at any second and it would be Tulsa all over again, but it’s hard to think of anything with Brendon looking so decadently wrecked, hair a mess and lips florid, leaning forward, biting at my hipbones. And of course he  _would_  give me that look again, the one that bores right through me and leaves me feeling raw and exposed, like there isn’t anything left of my carefully constructed walls to hide behind. He fucking  _would_  give me that look the exact moment his damnably full lips slip over my head, tongue lapping at my slit. “Bren,  _fuck_.”  
  
My back arches, the last of the tension from earlier drawing out of me as he moves lower with his tongue. Starting from the base of my shaft, he licks upward, swirling his tongue at my sensitive crown. The sound that comes out of me is barely even human, something primal and visceral that seems to fit perfectly with the way one of my hands darts down to tangle in his hair, fingers tugging roughly at the dark strands until he lets out a desperate little whimper with me still in his mouth - he likes to have his hair pulled. I’ll have to keep note of that. The vibration sinks all the way down to my skeleton and my jaw drops, an almost surprised moan exploding past my lips, far louder than I mean for it to be.  
  
“You guys okay up there?” Dean’s voice is muffled by the door, but by the sound of it, he’s standing at the bottom of the stairs. I curse under my breath. That son of a bitch knows exactly what’s going on.  
  
“Yeah, man, we’re fi- _ine_!” I yell back, tripping over the last word because it’s the exact moment that Brendon decides to suck for all he’s worth, tongue doing something absolutely sinful. Dean responds, but I can’t make out what he says, too busy biting back a groan and glaring down at Brendon with a whispered “Oh, fuck you.”  
  
He smirks, and holy hell does he look good like that, mouth full of cock and eyes glinting mischieviously in the twilight slipping in through the window. He does that  _thing_  with his tongue again, making my head drop back to the pillows before he comes up for air with an absolutely obscene wet popping noise, lips swollen and parted in a breathless smile. “I might take you up on that offer later.”  
  
“You ain’t gonna take me up on nothin’ if Winchester comes up here and walks in on - ahh,  _shit_.” My hips buck as he slips me back into his mouth, sucking down on me like he doesn't need to breathe. He moves one of his hands from my hip, scraping his nails sharply up my inner thigh and swallowing me down.  
  
I’ve been around the block, and I’ll admit that to anyone who asks. I’ve had and given my share of blowjobs. The last one I got was in some grimy bathroom in a bar in Chicago about two and a half weeks ago, some girl whose face I can’t remember and whose name I never learned, and it had  _nothing_  on this. Nothing in what muddled memory I can produce in my current state has anything on this. I never really took the time to ask about Brendon’s romantic history, but it’s obvious enough that he’s done this before. Something about that knowledge makes a spark of possessiveness flare up in the center of my chest, my hand tightening in his hair again. Mine.  _Mine_. Fate says so and so do I, we’re two parts of a whole, and if that’s not an implication of us belonging to each other, I don’t know what is. I want to hear him say it, want to see it in his eyes as I push him over the edge and watch him fall apart, want to scratch my name into his skin until it’s visible, tangible proof of -  
  
“Mine.” It comes out as something barely beyond a whisper, hitched onto the slurred edges of a moan as Brendon’s lips come down almost to the span of skin between my hipbones and I can feel myself scraping along the wet heat at the back of his throat. The hand still on my hip tightens its grip like some sort of affirmation, another wanton little whine rising up when I yank at his hair again and turn my head to muffle a fresh string of curses in the sweat-damp pillowcase.  
  
I can feel the beginnings of something that will tear me apart, vision blurring deliciously as he bobs up and down, tongue moving along my shaft. My hips begin to meet with his rhythm, each thrust forcing my cock further down his throat. He groans, looking up at me as he sucks even harder, eyes wide and dark and miles deep. He’s wrecking me. He knows it. I know it. There’s a sort of unspoken understanding in the brief moment of eye contact we make as he pulls back just enough to get some air before sinking right back down in a way that makes my eyes roll back in my head and my lids screw shut, the hand that’s not tangled in Brendon’s hair scrabbling for some sort of anchor in the rumpled sheets.  
  
“Bren... I- I'm not gonna...” Even though my words are slurred and incoherent, Brendon seems to catch the meaning. My mind nearly blacks out as he slips me out of his mouth, tongue swirling around my head. He smirks as he takes my cock down again, swallowing me whole. My entire body is a coiled spring, mouth working soundlessly, muscles taut, so close, so fucking close, teetering on the edge of insanity until I feel the rubber band pulled tight in the pit of my stomach snap with a force that bends my spine into a sudden arc, my eyes opening to stare sightlessly at the ceiling overhead as the entire world comes crashing down. “Holy… oh God, Brendon, fuck,  _fuck_!”  
  
The desperate tension of my voice dissolves into a low groan as I feel myself empty inside of his mouth, the iron grip I had on his hair loosening. Every speck of tension in my body evaporates, a pleasant tingling sensation spreading across my skin as Brendon swallows heavily and pulls back with another one of those filthy sucking sounds, grinning up at me with an eager puppy expression that doesn’t match at all with his sex hair and very noticeable blowjob lips. “Feel better?”  
  
I haven’t properly regained use of the English language yet, only able to offer a small, satisfied noise that almost sounds like a purr as I collapse into the mattress, feeling like my insides have been liquified. I’m not sure how long I lay there, staring blankly upwards and feeling my heartbeat reverberate all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, but I eventually regain enough of my faculties to reach down and yank my pants up before rolling over and grabbing a much-needed cigarette off the nightstand. “Jesus. Where the hell’d you learn how to do that?”  
  
“It’s a mix between natural talent, practice, and the fact that I got curious enough to read some of my mom’s trashy romance novels in middle school,” he deadpans before breaking out into a goofy grin, snickering to himself. I laugh along tiredly, my extremities still humming with aftershocks that only intensify when I look down and see the very obvious bulge in his jeans.  
  
“Gimme a minute and I can do somethin’ about that,” I smirk lazily, taking a long drag of my cigarette and exhaling a cloud of smoke upwards.  
  
Brendon just shakes his head, crawling up to stretch out beside me and reaching over the side of the bed to pull a little orange bottle out of my duffel bag - I guess I didn't leave my entire stash at Pete and Patrick's, after all. “Nah, I’m fine. What I want you to do is stay as relaxed as you are right now and get a good night’s sleep. And whatever happens tomorrow happens. Agreed?”  
  
“I guess.” Shrugging and wondering why the hell any sane man would turn down the prospect of getting his dick sucked - but then again, Brendon’s sanity is kind of subjective - I grab the bottle of Ambien from him and pop it open, stubbing out my cigarette before dry-swallowing two pills and burrowing under the unholy mess that the blankets have become. Brendon curls up beside me, and I twine my arms around him reflexively. Kissing him is second nature by now, and God, he tastes like me, that does something to me on a level that’s far beyond physical.  
  
He smiles against my mouth, fingers playing with my hair as I tug him closer, tangling our legs together. The pills start to kick in after a few minutes and I pull away, dizzy, curling into the pillows with my whole body still humming despite the heaviness of the Ambien pulling at my consciousness.  
  
“I was going to say it back, you know,” Brendon says softly, petting the messy hair back from my forehead and brushing his thumb across my temple.  
  
“Huh?” I slur, already too far gone to process it.  
  
“When you said you loved me back there. I was going to say it back. I was just shocked.”  
  
“No, don’t,” I mumble, brow furrowing and vision fading out to indiscriminate gray. “Wasn’t mad at you, Bren. I was mad at myself for sayin’ it in the first place. Don’t wanna say ‘I love you.’ People always die when I do.”  
  
That's it. That's why it had hurt so much.  
  
I fall asleep sometime after that, feeling more sated and secure than I have in a long time. Brendon’s heartbeat thrums steadily beneath my ear, his fingers tangled up with mine, and he’s right in the way he usually is.  
  
Whatever happens tomorrow happens. Worrying about it isn’t worth losing what I have right now.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, lovelies! It's been a horrendously long time since the last update, and as a reward for sticking around, you get... smut. Lots of smut. Thanks to Professor Chaos for helping me out with that <3

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is empty and cold. I’m not quite sure why I expected anything different - maybe I haven’t become quite so jaded that my sense of optimism is entirely dead - some other outcome of what happened last night than opening my eyes to Ryan’s inevitable absence. That’s the way he is. He’ll hold you close when he needs you, and push you away the moment he doesn’t so hard that you get emotional whiplash. If I could fathom anything beyond the irrational panic that spikes through my veins, I might be able to feel my heart snap backwards with bruising force. Instead, I’m struck with an icy sort of fear in the silence that lays heavy over the bedroom, rolling out of bed and scrambling out into the hallway. Fear of what, I can’t exactly tell - that he’s pulled something like he did a few days ago and run off to fight this battle on his own, that something horrible has happened to him, maybe even that he woke up and decided that I was just another thing to tack onto his list of mistakes. “Ryan?”  
  
“Woah, chill out.” In my blind panic, I almost run into Sam, who grabs me by the shoulders and stops me from careening headfirst down the stairs. “Ryan left a few hours ago; he said to let you sleep.”  
  
I feel like someone’s dropped a lead anvil into my stomach. So my hunch was right. It’s Chicago all over again. “And you just let him leave?! What the  _fuck_ , Sam, he’s going to get himself killed! How could you just -”  
  
“What the hell are you all fired up about? I could hear you yellin’ from the driveway.” The front door swings open in the middle of my sentence, revealing Ryan, looking a little careworn as always but otherwise none the worse for wear, an eyebrow raising steadily closer to his hairline as he steps over the threshold bearing a large bag from a Chinese takeout place.  
  
“Where have you been? Why didn’t you wake me up?” I snap, storming down the stairs and jabbing a finger angrily into his bony chest. “What happened to ‘we’re in this together,’ huh? I thought you’d run off and… and… hell if I know what!”  
  
“Sorry, Mom.” Rolling his eyes flippantly, Ryan maneuvers around me to go put the food down in the kitchen, almost pointedly not touching me as he does. Great. Square one all over again. “I got up early and went to Thornton to the Cabela’s they got down there. I figured you wouldn’t really enjoy it that much, so I just let you sleep. You like egg rolls?”  
  
“I… yeah.” At a loss for words and feeling a little stupid, I deflate and shuffle into the kitchen, curling sulkily into one of the chairs and watching Ryan dig three plates out of the cupboard. I blink confusedly, looking around the room and running a quick head count.  
  
“Dean left right after Ryan did,” Sam explains, grabbing a white cardboard container out of the takeout bag and flipping it open curiously. “We’ve got some issues of our own that got put on the backburner when you guys called us in, and one of our contacts called in with a lead. We knew Ryan would kill us both if we left you here alone, so I stayed behind. He’ll be back to get me tomorrow or the next day. He told me to give you this, though.”  
  
Carefully, Sam reaches into his waistband and pulls out a knife in an old leather sheath, handing it to me across the table. It’s a crude-looking thing, a handle that looks like some kind of bone with odd symbols carved into it, but the blade looks keen when I pull it a few inches out of the sheath, the same symbols glinting up at me. “What is it?”  
  
“Something that’s way above your pay grade, kid, give it here,” Ryan interjects with a frown, reaching for the knife before Sam grabs his arm and stops him.  
  
“Dean said to give it to Brendon.”  
  
“Dean’s a fuckin’ moron.”  
  
“Not really, considering the fact that the last time you touched one of our weapons, Atiria snapped it in half,” Sam deadpans, turning back over to me. “That knife kills demons. It’s very old, very rare, and very effective. Jab a demon just about anywhere with that thing, and they’re done for. If you guys are going to be fighting off whatever Crowley’s got guarding that portal, bullets alone won’t do you much good.”  
  
“But why would he give it to me and not Ryan?” I frown, confused, running the pads of my fingers pensively along the ridges and valleys of the knife’s bone handle.  
  
A sudden, heavy silence descends on the room, and I get the weird feeling that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Ryan stops fumbling ineffectually with the chopsticks in his hand, pausing with his food halfway to his mouth and looking over at Sam with a look of realization crossing his face. The petulant frown that he’d been wearing a few seconds ago dissolves, replaced with something grave and far more understanding by the time he looks back over at me. “Because Dean wants to make sure he gets that knife back.”  
  
It takes a few moments for me to grasp the implications of that. Dean trusts Ryan more than he trusts me, that much is obvious. So why give something he values so much to me, unless -  
  
Unless he thinks my chances of being alive to return the knife are better than Ryan’s.  
  
“Well then you can give it back to him. I’m horrible about dropping stuff anyway, so -”  
  
“Just keep the goddamn knife, Brendon,” Ryan snaps, eyes and voice hardening to the point that it’s almost laughable to imagine him the way he was last night, lips parted and voice slurred around the edges of my name. Feeling the sting of the words far more than I should, I shut my mouth and go back to my lunch.  
  
The rest of the meal passes in an awkward silence, the next words spoken the farewells between Sam and the two of us. He shakes hands with Ryan and pulls me into a quick one-armed hug, patting me on the back as we stand in the entry hall. “Good luck, guys. Keep us posted.”  
  
“Yeah, sure thing,” I nod, trying to manage a smile as I step out front door. Halfway across the porch, I stop in my tracks and turn around, sprinting back inside and up the stairs. I can hear Ryan’s distant  _What the hell, Bren?_  muffled through the floorboards, but I pay him no mind, barreling back into the bedroom and cursing myself for almost forgetting. When I walk back downstairs with Patrick’s fedora perched carefully on top of my head, Ryan doesn’t look confused anymore. Just horribly, horribly sad. I think about reaching out and grabbing his hand as he reaches for the driver’s side door of the Mustang, but with the mood he’s in, he’d probably break my wrist.  
  
A few yards up the road, I turn around to wave to Sam out the back window, letting out a low whistle when I see all the dehydrated food, sleeping bags, tents, and other supplies overflowing the back seat. “How are we supposed to haul all of this? I get that we’ll be up there for a while, but I don’t think we’ll need half this stuff when we can just have Elpis pop into the nearest town and go shopping for - is that a fucking  _crossbow?!_ ”  
  
“Hell yeah, it is,” Ryan grins excitedly, the action a welcome relief from the scowl he’s been wearing so far. “You’re right. We can’t haul enough freeze-dried food up there to feed us all for weeks, and we’d get sick if that’s all we ate. Crossbow’s good for huntin’ and we don’t gotta waste our ammo that way. You ever eat rabbit before?”  
  
“No, nor do I really want to try it,” I reply, horrified. “You look way too excited about that. My God, are you one of those sickos that shot deer for fun when you were a kid or something?”  
  
“Don’t go all PETA on me, Bren.” He rolls his eyes, turning the corner at the end of Sierra’s street. “I’m from Alabama. ‘Course I grew up huntin’. Besides, whatever’s up there guardin’ that portal ain’t the only thing we gotta worry about. Mountain lions, grizzlies, bobcats, all kinds of nasty critters. They ain't as cute as Animal Planet makes 'em look when they're tryin' to eat you."  
  
I shut up and decide that yeah, maybe the crossbow was a good investment, grabbing the iPod out of the cupholder and fiddling with it until I find the collective discography of Fleetwood Mac. “So, where to next?”  
  
Silence. A minute, fifteen, half an hour. In that stretch of time we don’t about last night, not that I really expected us to. It was a sort of unspoken understanding that came with me waking up alone, staring at the other side of the bed, nothing but the memory of him in the dent of the blankets. I should have known better than to expect anything more. I think about bringing it up, about saying everything that’s pressing fervently against the backs of my teeth,  _I want this to last, I want this, I want..._  
  
And then, miracle of miracles, Ryan reaches over and grabs my hand after several miles on the highway. Suddenly relieved, I realize that I never needed to say anything. He knows.  
  
“We’re gonna drive the rest of the way to Denver, meet up with Elpis, and find us a library,” he finally mumbles absently, the fingers of his other hand drumming on the steering wheel. “Need to get topography maps, more details about the terrain. We’ll set up our search grid, take a day or two to lay out a strategy and start lookin’ after that.”  
  
I nod and lapse into another long silence, watching the traffic thicken as we move closer to Denver. Ryan disentangles his hand from mine to shift into a lower gear and then grabs it again, his thumb brushing across my knuckles. It feels familiar in a way that doesn’t make sense, like we’ve been doing this for years when it’s never actually happened before. I attribute it to the whole ‘prophetically bound’ thing and leave it at that. In a way, that’s the one thing that Ryan and I have easy. There’s an instant justification for the entity of us, and there’s a certain security in that.  
  
“So… last night,” I venture, suddenly made brave by the solidity of his hand in mine.  
  
“Bren,” he groans, leaning his head back against the headrest and looking pained. “Do we really gotta go there?”  
  
“No, I guess. I mean, I’d be okay with talking about it if you wanted to,” I shrug, picking at a loose thread in my jeans and beginning to wish that I’d left a good thing alone and kept my mouth shut. “I’m not pushing you or anything.”  
  
“You are. You’re bringin’ up the subject in the car, which makes me a captive audience. You’re pushin’ the conversation, so at least own up to it.” The tone of Ryan’s voice instantly becomes harder and more drawn, but he doesn’t pull his hand away, seeming to be more tired than really angry as he navigates around a tractor-trailer and back into the right lane. “I don’t even see what the hell there is to talk about. It happened. No one’s denyin’ it.”  
  
“Hey. Come off the defensive for two seconds and -”  
  
“I ain’t bein’ defensive!”  
  
“If you can’t even let me finish a sentence, you’re being defensive, so at least own up to it,” I counter in an echo of Ryan’s logic, which earns me a grudging silence that equates to me being right. “I’m not accusing you of denying anything. It’s kind of impossible to, anyway. We were both there. All I’m trying to say is that it meant something to me. Hell, it was pretty significant, actually. I just wanted to gauge your reaction and make sure we’re on the same page with this.”  
  
Ryan stays quiet for a few more seconds, looking out at the road with his lips pursed into a thin pink line. After a very long, uncomfortable pause, he steers with his knee long enough to light a cigarette with his free hand, cracking the window and completely refusing to look in my direction. “Are you askin’ if it meant something to me?”  
  
“I’d kind of like to know, yeah.”  
  
And  _now_  he yanks his hand away, wrapping his skeletal fingers around the steering wheel so hard that the knuckles go white, making a stark contrast to the healing wound that he got from punching the mirror in Sierra’s bathroom. “I oughta kick your ass.”  
  
“I shouldn’t have brought it up, sorry,” I balk, starting to wring my hands and cursing myself for the pushiness that’s always gotten me into trouble as far as Ryan’s concerned. Everything I have with him seems to be one step forward and five steps back, a small moment of him opening a door for me that always ends with him slamming my fingers in it before I can get inside. “I’m being stupid. Forget I said anything.”  
  
The traffic has slowed almost to a dead stop, and Ryan turns around to glare at me, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “First of all, next time I hear you call yourself stupid, I’ll pop you right in the mouth. Second of all, I’m pissed as all hell that you’d think for even a second that last night didn’t mean something to me.”  
  
I blink at him a few times. “Well, I wasn’t sure. I figured that you’d think it was just a-”  
  
“You ain’t some coked-up slut in a nightclub bathroom, Brendon,” he sighs like I’m missing the point, raking a hand through his hair and slamming a little too-late on the brakes to stop just short of the rear bumper in front of us. “There’s a big difference between ‘just a blowjob’ and… and that, whatever that was. That the answer you were lookin’ for? Yeah, it meant something. It meant a lot. Now can we stop talkin’ about it? So many goddamn emotions in this car I’m startin’ to feel like paintin’ my toenails and watchin’ John Hughes movies.”  
  
“Yeah, okay,” I snort, offering my hand and giving an internal sigh of relief when Ryan takes it with a quick squeeze.  
  
I grin over at him, and after a beat, he smiles back, his  _real_  smile, the one that makes him glow like his own self-contained star. Small victories. They’re worth it. I’d gladly go through all the innumerable times that I’ve felt like it was impossible to get over Ryan’s mile-high walls in order to get this fleeting glance to what’s inside, the crooked curve of his smile as he guns the engine and sings a soft harmony to the chorus of ‘Landslide’ like he thinks I don’t notice it.  
  


* * *

  
“No, you ain’t listenin’ to me. We can’t take off the hex bags, okay? That’s why I’m tellin’ you where to go.” Ryan looks about two seconds from shooting something, and all of his tension within the small space of the car is infectious. The traffic in Denver is nothing short of unreal, bumper to bumper and clogged with honking horns that gave me a headache about twenty minutes ago. To make it worse, Ryan’s been shouting into his cell phone at Elpis for the past minute or so, and she’s clearly not getting the picture. For similar reasons, the both of us groan in stereo and rub our hands across our faces. I feel like hell, Ryan’s reasonably frustrated, and traffic hasn’t moved since he picked up the phone. Awesome. His hand tightens around the phone and he grumbles something unintelligible under his breath before trying again. “No, we’re still in traffic… Yeah, I know that. I’m callin’ you now so you can meet us there, that’s why! Look, just… It’s the big building on West Fourteenth… No, Elpis, I don’t have the damn street number! Hell, I’m sittin’ half a mile away and I can see the place, I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble. Yeah… Yeah, okay. You see it? All right, go inside, we’ll be there in ten to fifteen minutes.”  
  
He clicks his phone off, chucks it in the cupholder, and leans forward to rest his forehead against the steering wheel with an exasperated sigh. I can’t help but grin, reaching over and giving one bony shoulder a squeeze. “Translation issues?”  
  
“I never thought I’d see the day I met anything that was more fuckin’ clueless than Castiel.” Traffic lurches forward a few inches, and Ryan snaps to attention long enough to shift gears and barely tap the gas pedal, our progress over the last ten minutes a grand total of maybe fifteen yards.  
  
“She means well,” I shrug, fiddling around with the sheathed knife that Sam gave me back in Cheyenne. During Ryan’s phone conversation, I got bored enough to hold it in my outstretched palm, staring at the heavy metal and trying to make it move without much success. My eyes narrow in concentration, and after another few seconds I feel the familiar electricity spark down my arm. The knife goes airborne, hovering right in front of my nose and prompting a self-satisfied smirk.  
  
“I ain’t so sure about that - hey, what the hell d’you think you’re doin’?!”  
  
Before I even have time to feel proud of myself, Ryan snatches the knife out of the air, glaring at me. Irritated, I concentrate a little harder until it goes flying out of his grip, back to its previous place in the empty space in front of me. With a little extra thought, I’m able to send it revolving in a wobbly orbit around my head, continuously bouncing away from Ryan’s grasping hands. “Sam said I need to practice if I want to get better at it.”  
  
“Sam also spent the better part of a year hopped up on demon blood, so I wouldn’t exactly call him a trusted authority on the safe way to deal with superhuman powers,” Ryan snaps, pinching my leg hard enough that I yelp and jerk backwards. My concentration broken, the knife falls out of orbit and knocks me right in the top of the skull, doing nothing to help my headache. “And there are people in the cars all around us. Low profile, remember? So slow your roll, Criss Angel, we don’t wanna draw attention to ourselves.”  
  
“Yeah, whatever,” I grumble, pocketing the knife as traffic starts to move again. Ryan glares at me as if daring me to keep it up, so I opt to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the trip up the street and into the parking lot of the Denver Public Library, a massive, seven-story behemoth of a building that makes my inner bookworm squirm in anticipation.  
  
“All right, let’s get this show on the road.” The fatigue in Ryan’s voice is palpable as he yanks the keys out of the ignition and shuffles out onto the pavement, grumbling at the cold. “You know where to find maps in a place like this, Bren? Only time I ever been in a library is when Z and Spence and I cleared out a haunted one back in ‘06. Didn’t get to browse much.”  
  
“There should be an area dedicated to local interests. Most libraries have them, and one this big might have a whole floor for it,” I reply through chattering teeth, grabbing Ryan by the wrist and tugging him towards the door. “That’s where we’ll find maps. Property maps, topographical maps -”  
  
“That’s what we need.”  
  
“And unless they’re really old, it won’t be hard to take one back into a study room, mark it up, and sneak it out.” The warmth is instantaneous when we step through the door, the smell of books and coffee washing over us in a wave. The entry hall to the library is massive, big escalators climbing either side to carry hordes of people up into the upper levels. There’s a big map on the wall behind the front desk that I look at as I’m shaking the last of the cold out of my limbs, reading over the breakdown of the different section. “Level Five, Western History and Genealogy. That’s our best bet.”  
  
Ryan nods sharply, pursing his lips. “All right, let’s head up there and -”  
  
“Ryan! Brendon! Over here!” Elpis comes trotting across the entry hall, waving frantically and not doing a very good job keeping a low profile at all. Spencer’s exterior looks like a trainwreck, clothes torn and a large bruise splotched across one cheekbone. I can practically feel Ryan gearing up for an absolute fit beside me, reach back and grab his hand in a silent warning that this isn’t the best place to yell at someone. We all meet halfway, congregating in a small clump near one of the escalators with Elpis looking us over speculatively. “You look tired.”  
  
“And you look like someone who’s breakin’ a promise,” Ryan hisses, pointing to the spot on his own face that matches where Spencer’s bruise is. “What did I say about him not havin’ a scratch? You think I’m kiddin’? I’ll take the kid and go right now and we’ll do this on our own.”  
  
“Oh, did I miss a spot?” Elpis looks a bit confused for a second, fingers coming up to brush over the damaged skin. Almost instantaneously, the blemish clears, leaving Spencer looking considerably better. “I promised you that Spencer would be fine when I left him, which is a promise I haven’t broken, given the fact that he is still my vessel. I  _do_  have healing abilities, you know.”  
  
“I… fine.” Eyes narrowed, Ryan crosses his arms and leans against a nearby bookshelf. “What’d you find up there?”  
  
“Nothing. Although, I didn’t expect to find anything. I was operating under a method I believe you would call ‘shooting in the dark.’ I would travel to a random location, attempt to sense the box, and move on when I felt nothing. I spent all of last night and most of today doing this, and we have nothing to show for it.”  
  
“Well, that still gives us places to mark off on the map,” I shrug, playing with the zipper on my backpack. “If we don’t know exactly where the box is, it makes sense to find out where it’s not.”  
  
“At least you’re optimistic,” Ryan sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, eyes fluttering shut. “Listen, Elpis, give Spence the reins for a bit. I got stuff to do around town, and I need him to help Brendon out with a job.”  
  
“Of course.” With a flash of silver flitting across his eyes, Spencer shifts into agency over his own body, blinking dazedly and reaching over to wrap an arm around Ryan in a quick hug before repeating the action on me. Surprised, I only manage to pat him awkwardly on the back before he steps away, scratching at the back of his head and looking up at the entrance hall’s high ceilings. “I smell a coffee shop in here somewhere. I’d kill a man for a big ol’ blueberry muffin.”  
  
“We can swing by on the way up to Level Five.” That earns me a glare from Ryan, who undoubtedly thinks there are more important things to do, but I remember Spencer saying how hungry he gets when Elpis has the steering wheel, and I could do with some caffeine myself. “Do you know where you were well enough to point it out on a map, Spencer?”  
  
“Reckon I do,” he nods pensively before turning to focus on Ryan. “It’s some rough country up there, brother. Ice, snow, loose rocks, ravines. The fauna ain’t no Disney movie, either. I saw more cougars than I did that one night you went into that bar and -”  
  
“All right, Spence, we get the picture,” Ryan cuts him off sharply, looking back at me with a little spark of panic. I make a mental note to ask Spencer for the full story later. “Y’all know your jobs. Bren, you take him upstairs and get the map. Spencer, you lay out a grid and mark off wherever it was that you and Elpis went. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”  
  
"Where are you going?" I ask, already inherently uneasy at the idea of him being anywhere but in my direct line of sight. It's not so much clinginess as it is something I've come to accept as a fact of life. For almost the entirety of our time together, Ryan's been where I can see him, sleeping in a bed across a motel room, puttering around HQ, sitting next to me as the Mustang sped down the highway. The prospect of being alone - or at least somewhat alone, given that Spencer's here - in an unfamiliar place makes me feel uncomfortable and on-edge.  
  
Ryan picks up on that almost instantaneously, reaching out and giving my shoulder a squeeze. "Nothin' all that interestin'. Gotta go talk to a contact of mine about keepin' my car at his place, pick up some more silver bullets, stuff like that. You know I'm absolute shit at research. I'll just annoy y'all and slow you down if I stay here and try to help. And if something happens, I'll be ten minutes up the road, give or take. Just call me."  
  
"Okay," I nod, offering a tense smile. I don't feel unsafe, at least not any more than I usually do. I've learned to take care of myself. There's a gun tucked into the back of my waistband underneath the threadbare fabric of my hoodie, I've got my hex bag on under my hoodie, and something tells me that despite her apparent attitude of pacifism, Elpis would be pretty formidable in a fight. It's not fear for my own safety that makes me watch Ryan right up to the point that he walks out the door and disappears around the corner. It's a different sort of unpleasantness that settles heavily in the pit of my stomach, a distinct sensation of detachment, of something cutting my ties and leaving me to drift. For however short the time might be, I've lost my anchor.  
  
"All right, so coffee and maps?" Spencer says, injecting a little extra enthusiasm into his voice that isn't lost on me.  
  
"Yeah," I reply tiredly, heading for the nearest escalator. Coffee and maps. Coffee and maps, timetables and the end of the world.  
  
The coffee shop isn't terribly crowded, and within a few minutes we're making our way up to Level Five. I'm sipping steadily at a mocha latte, feeling more tired than I have in days as I step back on the escalator. Spencer's right behind me with the contents of a small bakery in a brown paper bag clutched in his arms like a precious artifact, gnawing voraciously on a muffin. "Oo oh-hay, Bwen? Oo feem i-uh own."  
  
I turn around to look at him, tilting my head. "Huh?"  
  
Spencer swallows heavily, balling up the muffin wrapper in his hand. "I said, are you okay? You seem kinda down."  
  
"Oh, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm  _peachy_." If my eyes rolled any more, I'd be looking at the inside of my own head. "The end of the world is pretty much imminent, the future of the human race is effectively riding on you, me, and Ryan, the embodiment of Evil itself wants to gut me and drain my blood  _again_ , and I've got a tension headache that could knock out Tyson. I'm _great_ , Spencer, how are you?"  
  
“Well, someone’s been spendin’ time with Ryan,” he says mildly, raising his hands in a defensive gesture before digging a scone out of his treasure trove from the coffee shop.  
  
I don’t give him a response as we get back on the escalator, musing to myself that he’s probably right. I never used to be this snippy, even on a bad day. In fact, I was one of those people who made myself as congenial and unobtrusive as possible, walked through life with a big smile no matter how I actually felt for the sake of not rocking the boat. The person I am now would probably punch the person I was in the face after about ten seconds. I can’t really say if that’s a change for the better or the worse, but either way, it’s a change that’s kept me alive. Skepticism and frankness are two tools in a hunter’s arsenal that Ryan taught me firsthand, and I suppose I’ve learned better than I might have thought.  
  
Level Five is quiet and mostly unpopulated, save for a few people milling around in the Genealogy section. There are several study rooms across the other side of the floor, and a big archway with ‘Maps’ written over it off to the left. Spencer and I share a look before walking over, ducking inside and starting to prowl through the shelves. There are atlases and big volumes of surveyor’s data yellowed with age and racks upon racks of loose maps, so many that I don’t have a clue of where to start. Sighing, I give Spencer a sidelong glance. “I suppose it would be too good to be true if you knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System.”  
  
He tilts his head to the side curiously, cheeks puffed up around the half of a powdered donut he just bit off. Well, there’s my answer.  
  
It takes a few minutes, but I manage to lay hands on a topography map of the Rocky Mountains, stealing away back into one of the study rooms and spreading the thing out over the table. “Okay. Start marking the areas you’ve already checked out.”  
  
“Now, this is all real general, ‘course,” Spencer hums, pulling a pen out of his pocket and mulling over the map, his eyes flashing silver for a second before he starts marking small areas, circles that when put to scale are about ten miles in diameter. By the time he finishes, another silver flash and a heavy sigh, the amount of the map that’s actually covered is just plain sad.  
  
“Well… it’s somewhere to start.” Optimism. It’s all we’ve got right now.  
  
Brow furrowing, Spencer leans across the table and runs his hand over the open expanse of unexplored territory. “How in the hell are we gonna cover all this?”  
  
“At least we know where  _not_  to look,” I hum, staring at the map. And then it clicks. Smacking a hand off my forehead in chastisement for not coming up with the idea sooner, I look up at Spencer with a wide grin. “And maybe we won’t have to. We can do what you did. Narrow it down.”  
  
“Elaborate,” he says, gesturing for me to go on. Spencer’s not the type to shut out new ideas, and besides, we’re grasping at straws right now as it is.  
  
“That portal’s been guarded since 1950. But with the population boom, there’s really not that much of these mountains that hasn’t been either settled or at least traversed.” Running a hand up the paper representation of the Rockies, I start pointing out the locations of major cities. “With all the people in these mountains, there’s no way someone hasn’t stumbled a little too close to that portal at least once. So we research locations where people have gone missing since 1950, cross reference them with the map, get a few hotspots to check out instead of an entire mountain range of nothing.”  
  
Spencer blinks. “That’s fuckin’ brilliant.”  
  
“It’s common sense, really,” I shrug.  
  
“No, I mean it. After this whole thing blows over, you should settle down and start a dispatch, kid. Head like that on your shoulders, you could be the next Patrick Stump in a year.”  
  
Something heavy and sad sinks in my chest, and I shake my head, reaching up to run my fingers across the brim of the fedora as I pull my laptop out of my backpack. “No one’s ever going to replace Patrick. I only knew him for a few weeks, and even I could tell he was one in a billion.”  
  
The only response I get from Spencer is a vague, sad nod. Pursing my lips and looking down at the map, I stick Spencer’s pen behind my ear and boot up my laptop, bringing up a search engine and praying to whatever higher power is out there to listen to me. My methodology might be easier than climbing all over a mountain range, but it’s certainly not simple in and of itself. I can only hope that what Ryan said about me having a gut for things like this ends up serving us well instead of getting us all killed.  
  


* * *

  
The loud blaring of my phone startles me so much that I nearly fall off my chair.  
  
An hour and a half of work from two computers has blossomed into a few new ten-to-twenty-mile circles on the map, areas where more than one person has gone missing since 1950. It’s not an infallible method, but my hunch about there being hotspots was right. Of course, the multiple missing persons could be chalked up to dangerous terrain or ravenous wild animals instead of a cave guarded by demons, but it’s somewhere to start. I’m so deep in concentration when my pocket starts buzzing that the sudden interruption makes me jump up with a strangled shout, my fight-or-flight response honed by months of equating any surprise with the possibility of imminent death.  
  
“It’s Ryan,” I mutter to Spencer once I’ve calmed down long enough to look at my caller ID, swiping my thumb across the screen and bringing the phone up to my ear. “Hey, is everything all right?”  
  
 _“Yeah, just got a little hung up with my errands. Y’all makin’ any headway over there?”_  I can hear the rumble of the Mustang’s engine and the stereo blasting Van Halen in the background, so wherever he is, he’s on the road.  
  
“A reasonable amount, yeah. I’ve got a few leads on coordinates where we can start looking.” holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder, I sit back down and finish my latest search query, a missing group of campers in 1973 that warrants another circle on the map. “I’ve been cross-referencing missing persons cases in close proximity to each other and marking them on the map. We’ve got about five potential locations so far.”  
  
Ryan’s silent for a moment, before he mutters something along the lines of  _“Shit, that’s smart.”_  
  
“Yeah, Spencer’s already informed me that I’m a paragon of hunting genius,” I smirk into the mouthpiece. “I should call Sam and tell him to watch out before I steal his thunder. What took you so long to find an extended parking space?”  
  
 _“Bren, listen.”_  I stiffen a bit at the words, feeling like they might be the precursor to something bad, but there’s no tension in Ryan’s voice. In fact, when I listen closely, I can almost hear a smile in it.  _“I need you to meet me in the lobby here in about five minutes.”_  
  
“Uh… okay?” My face knits up in a confused expression, and Spencer shoots me a weird look over the screen of his own laptop, chewing on the very last of the baked goods he bought at the coffee shop. I wave him off and lean down to rifle through my duffel bag. “We were just starting to make some real headway, I mean, do you really need me? What’s- ”  
  
 _“Just meet me downstairs,”_  Ryan snaps gruffly, and the call cuts off before I can respond.  
  
“What’s he got a wild hair up his ass about?” Spencer asks as soon as I put my phone back in my pocket.  
  
“It’s Ryan. The answer to your question is ‘everything,’” I tell him, rolling my eyes. “I’m supposed to go change and meet him downstairs. You think you can tackle some more of this research on your own?”  
  
“Reckon I can. Our resources are about tapped out, anyway,” he shrugs, running a hand through his hair and messing it up even further. A second later, his phone buzzes. Frowning, Spencer digs the beat-up old prepaid model out of his pocket and squints at the screen for a moment before a look of realization washes over his face and he grins up at me. “You go and go see what he wants, Brendon. I’ll be fine here. I’ll see y’all tomorrow, I’m sure.”  
  
“Tomorrow? Why not just later today?”  
  
“Go on, get. Before Ross gets irritated and makes both of our lives miserable.” Spencer practically shoves me out the door, duffel bag in hand, and I spend the next few minutes of my life wondering just how I’ve gotten to the point where solving the apocalypse in a public library doesn’t really feel that weird.  
  
I probably look like the picture of insanity as I hop off the escalator in the lobby, grumbling to myself. First he tells me to come do research, and then I get a snippy phone call telling me that I have five minutes to be in the lobby, on my way off to do God knows what. Ass.  
  
Still muttering under my breath, I head for the front door, sidestepping some college kid with a cup of coffee in her hands and brushing past a guy in a suit, wondering -  
  
“Brendon.”  
  
I turn around to trace the source of the voice behind me, and I can’t help but feel a little stupid that my jaw drops a little. I’d been too preoccupied to notice and too set in my perception of him to even imagine that the tall form in a well-tailored suit I just walked past was actually Ryan. Hell, I didn’t think he even  _owned_  a suit, which in retrospect was kind of a dumb assumption, seeing as he probably has to pose as FBI on a weekly basis when he’s working regular jobs. He looks uncomfortable in the clothes, pulling at the cuffs of his jacket and fidgeting with the knot of a red silk tie that’s hanging a little off-center, but he still looks good,  _God_ , does he still look good.  
  
“Wow. Hi.” That’s about all I can formulate.  
  
“Hi,” he replies, a little smirk tugging at his lips. “What’re you lookin’ at?”  
  
“You. You look nice,” I shrug, falling into step beside him and walking outside. It’s not until we’re both sitting in the Mustang and headed down the street until I even think to ask. “So, why are you dressed up and where are we going?”  
  
Ryan grins and turns the stereo up a bit. “You’ll see.”  
  
“I don’t like surprises, Ross, especially when they’re coming from you.”  
  
“Rude,” he snorts, changing lanes quickly and turning the first corner after the library. “For your information, I’m takin’ you on a date.”  
  
“Yeah, right. No offense, but you don’t seem the dating type. More like the ‘let’s drink beer and watch football and maybe we can fuck afterwards’ type. Seriously, where are we going?” As soon as I say it, I’m struck with the immediate feeling that I’ve shoved my foot in my mouth. A flash of hurt skates across Ryan’s face, quickly replaced by an irritated scowl, his lips pressed into a thin line as he flicks on his blinker signal again. “I didn’t mean… I mean, if you want to that’s great, I just didn’t think…”  
  
“I know you think I’m a backwoods hick, but I ain’t a complete savage,” he snaps, swinging into a parking lot that has a valet booth but breezing right past it. “I just figured that with imminent death starin’ us down, we might as well eat, drink, and be merry. I made the reservations and checked in after I dropped you off.”  
  
Frowning confusedly, I look out the window, finally realizing where we are.“The Ritz-Carlton Denver? Seriously?”  
  
“Like I said, imminent death on the horizon, weeks of sleepin’ in a tent, might as well get a nice hotel room beforehand, right?” he grins, producing a key card from his wallet and holding it up between two skeletal fingers. “Wait’ll you see it, Bren. There’s a chandelier in the bathroom.”  
  
I end up laughing all the way inside. I've heard that life-threatening situations do funny things to people. From my experience, they make me feel sick, and apparently they turn Ryan Ross into a shameless romantic. There are certainly worse outcomes.  
  
The lobby is huge and lush, all marble and rich carpeting and soft lighting that makes me feel about a million miles out of my pay grade after spending the past month or so bedding down in crummy motel rooms or on Pete and Patrick’s couch. It’s busy, lots of people in suits and carrying briefcases - Ryan probably put his on to check in so he wouldn’t stand out - the bustle so pronounced that no one even looks twice at me in my jeans and hoodie as I follow Ryan onto the elevator. “So why isn’t Spencer coming?”  
  
“Spence can pay for his own goddamn hotel room,” Ryan snorts, fiddling with the key card until the elevator stops on the fifth floor and he waves me out into the hallway working his way down to room 509 and fixing me with a grin. “Welcome to swank city, Mr. Urie.”  
  
It’s gorgeous. Not a suite or anything by the looks of it, just a normal room for a five-star hotel, but after so many nights sleeping on creaky mattresses stained with God-knows-what, I might as well be in fucking Shangri-La. I run my fingers carefully over the heavily-embroidered gold comforter draped across the bed - one bed, one big, massive, soft-looking bed - looking around at the big flatscreen perched on the dresser, the elegant wineglasses and cold bottle sitting on the table in the corner.  
  
The two boxes of pizza next to it.  
  
“The prices for room service were fuckin’ ridiculous,” Ryan shrugs. I laugh and throw my arms around his waist, pulling his head down until his lips meet mine. The door clicks shut behind us, sealing off the world. For the first time, Ryan and I are on the same side of his walls, and for a moment, I almost understand why he keeps them up so carefully. Being inside is the closest thing people like us will ever know to contentment.  
  


* * *

  
Most of a bottle of Pinot Grigio later, I'm merrily tipsy and even Ryan seems to have relaxed a little bit, laughing at my stories about the dumb shit my friends and I used to get into at UNLV and reaching over to grab my hand after his second glass of wine. Somewhere between him making a stupid Clint Eastwood reference and me telling him that he needs to learn how to tie a tie straight, I'm struck with the sudden thought that this is the most normal we've ever been with each other. An hour has passed, two hours, and neither of us have mentioned monsters or hunting or the end of the world. It's almost disarming, that normalcy, so far removed from the way my life has been lately that it almost feels like I'm living on the pages of someone else's story. This could be a chapter from the old Brendon's life, something warm and easy, something I'm not sure I even know how to do anymore.  
  
But this respite ends tomorrow. For the sake of experiencing it while I still can, I'll try.  
  
“Pizza and wine,” I snort, sitting down my empty glass and taking the last sip straight from the bottle. My manners went out the window about twenty minutes and two glasses ago. “You sure know how to show a boy a good time.”  
  
Ryan laughs, and it’s something genuine, not the slightest hint of sarcasm in the sound as it reverberates off the walls. “I wanted to take you out somewhere, but it wasn’t a great idea to parade you around out in the open. I don’t trust Crowley to keep his mouth shut, and with At-”  
  
“Don’t talk about her.” My voice is sharper than I mean for it to be when I cut him off, looking up from the surface of the table and frowning as I try to give voice to the tight feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Not here. This is… this is the last safe place I have. Here. With you. I don’t want her here, not her or the prophecy or Pete or Patrick or any of this shitstorm, Ryan, I don’t  _want_  it here.”  
  
His hand tightens around mine, a concerned look etching its way into his features when my voice breaks around the last part of my sentence. Ryan knows what it’s like. Not being able to hold onto a good thing. Watching everything you care about get ripped away eventually. I’ve come to accept that this is my life now, my fate. No matter what the outcome of the future is, it ends with me losing everything. But not this. Not yet.  
  
I’m not ready to lose him.  
  
“Okay, okay, calm down,” he rushes out, not quite as drunk as me, reaching across the table and pressing his cool palm to the side of my alcohol-heated face. “Then what  _do_  you want here?”  
  
And that’s the one question in the fucking world that I don’t have to think about to come up with an answer. “You.”  
  
Something shifts. A switch flips, a line is crossed, and Ryan leans over the table, pulling the fabric of my shirt and causing our mouths to come together.  My lips part under the pressure - a delicious combination of cigarettes and wine. This is what I want, what I can’t have. This, every day, the version of Ryan that comes with normalcy, the one that doesn’t touch me like my skin burns him or spit ‘I love you’ like a curse. I want what I’ve seen in flashes over the days and weeks and months that he’s been in my life, every grudging smile, every glowing pinpoint of lightheartedness, everything embodied in a desperate grip and broken Come back to me.  
  
I want Ryan in a capacity in which I can never have him, and it burns all the way down to the center of me.  
  
But I can compromise. That’s what life is, isn’t it? A series of give and take, although lately it feels like mine’s been in the taking mood. I can bargain for this, though, can have him like this for one night with the realization that I probably won’t live long enough to lose him again, to watch him shut me out and go back to living by himself in that fortress he’s spent so much time building. I’ll take a trial run over a lifetime of window shopping, even if it means hurting even more once it’s over. The one consolation I can give myself is that when everything is over, he’ll remember this. He’ll remember me.  
  
“Fuck, Bren,” he moans as I move to bite at his jawline, marking my way down his neck. He’ll see the marks tomorrow and won’t be able to deny this, no matter how badly he wants to. We stumble from the table to the bed, our mouths bruising together. There is no time or place for gentleness here. There never is with him.  
  
We crash down on the bed, the mattress sinking beneath the combined weight and making me feel like I’m drowning for more reasons than one. Ryan falls on top of me, kicking off his shoes and muttering something against my lips that I can’t decipher. He is a hurricane of desperate hands and frenzied motion, grinding his hips against mine and pulling a groan from the center of my chest. Fast. Hard. He wants this to be over so he can get to the part after where he hates himself for letting it happen.  
  
You can fall in love with many kinds of people who can hurt you. Abusers, manipulators, liars, cheats. Ryan is none of the above, but for the briefest moment, I almost wish he was. There are a lot of ways to get wounded when it comes to matters of the heart, but I’ve come to realize that nothing, absolutely nothing hurts more than loving a masochist.  
  
We tangle closer, my fingers fumbling against the crooked knot of his tie, tugging it off and tossing it off into the irrelevant void beyond the end of the bed. Alcohol and mental fatigue have made me sloppy, the motions it takes for me to undo the buttons of his shirt sluggish and time-consuming, or maybe that’s just the fact that somewhere along the line, my hands have started to shake. I can feel Ryan frowning against the hinge of my jaw, his hands abandoning my hair to help me with the rest of his shirt before tugging mine hastily over my head. In the first display of gentleness since the kiss over at the table, callused fingertips slide up my abdomen, tracing the jagged line of the scar there. Swallowing heavily, I look down at where Ryan is kneeling beside me on the bed, something broken in him made even more visible as he continues tracing the line of raised tissue. “This was my fault.”  
  
I’m not sure if he’s talking about the scar on my torso or the one that’s not visible, the raw place in my chest that blazes whenever he touches me and makes me feel like something is eating me alive from the inside. In at least one case, he’s right. He did his best to save me back in Wyoming, but the other wound goes much deeper than that, goes all the way back to Chicago and his lips pressed to mine with no one but a ghost to witness it. I can’t blame Ryan for much, but I can put that responsibility on his shoulders.  
  
It is his fault that I’m in love with him, the bastard. He’s responsible for wrecking me like this. Instead of telling him that, I kiss him again, biting his lower lip hard enough to bruise. I love him in a way that’s different from hissing the words in a driveway over a broken car, and I guess that in the end, maybe that’s my fault after all.  
  
The air in the room is too thick to breathe.  My vision is draped in a veil of red, lust and hurt pooling like hot liquid in my guts, setting my senses ablaze.  I hear nothing beyond my own ragged breaths, the light kisses he trails down across my scarred skin, his groans as he feels me getting harder beneath his palm pressed to the front of my jeans.  Ryan moves upwards, teeth sinking into the skin of my neck through a smirk that I can feel. I rasp out something incoherent as he bites down harder, working on leaving a mark. Maybe he's not so hell-bent on doing this just to deny it later. I pull him away from my chest and brush my lips against his.  
  
"I love you." The words have blades tied to the end of them, dragging up my throat with a strangling sort of pain.  
  
Ryan pulls back, blinking down at me in what looks like disbelief. "I love you too."  
  
"I wish I didn't."  
  
"I know. For your sake, I wish you didn't too." he murmurs, forehead pressed against mine and fingers tracing the ridges of my ribs absently. "D’you want me to stop?"  
  
"No." I practically choke in my haste to get the word out, fingers splaying across his shoulder blades and holding him to me. The wine and desperation drags at the tip of my tongue, making articulation impossible. “God, no.”  
  
Nothing hurts more than loving a masochist, and Ryan hurts, I can see it in him as surely as I see it in myself. There’s something almost pained and the sharp intake of his breath as he kisses down my chest, rough hands slowly beginning to undo my jeans. “Okay.”  
  
My jeans peel from me with ease but my boxers catch on the soft hairs of my thighs, damp and trembling, their rough band scraping along the sensitive flesh on the insides of my legs. Ryan smirks as he pulls them away until the slightest glint of his teeth makes my cock twitch from where it presses against the fabric of his pants. His lips write silent words into my chest, worlds and wishes I can't make out when his mouth is pressed against the groove of my hip, laving the sharp ridge, a quick bite that whispers mine in ways I thought he never would. His tongue licks the words from my mouth as he leaves a trail of spit-slick skin in his wake, goosebumps prickling as his lips - lacquered in saliva - find purchase around the base of my shaft. I gasp out something that could have been a moan in another life, my spindly fingers winding tight through his hair for grounding as he curls his tongue around my cock and allows my reactions to guide his touch.  
  
“F-fuck,” spills from my throat, desperate and harsh as his warm mouth swallows my length. His fingers create twin bruises on the curvature of my hips, a heliotrope belt that joins on the flat expanse of my navel, pressing firmer as I attempt to buck forward. Ryan’s smirk is warped from where his lips stretch around the girth of my cock, sloppy and sucking and perfect, and his eyes betray the hold he knows he has on me as he swallows and listens to me cry out where I fall helpless under his touch.  
  
My insides clench as he releases to tongue the slit, mouth shiny and wet, torn between wanting to kiss him and taste myself on his lips and letting him continue until we both get what we want. The bedsheets are soft underneath my burning skin, rustling against my ass as I rock my hips into his mouth, and I fist them in two grasping hands to bring them to my face. It’s too much too fast; the way he gags as he takes my entire length, his eyes like twin eclipses watching the tension in my brow. I whimper as he nibbles, dragging my right hand helplessly through his hair and tugging him away.  
  
“No more,” I hum, gasping as he takes a long lick up my shaft, “Ry, ngh, I can’t--”  
  
His hand circles me loosely, his rough palm shooting sparks through my blood as he strokes languidly, all too aware of the power he exerts with a brush of his fingers. “You still with me?”  
  
Like he doesn’t already know the answer. “Not if you keep - oh,  _fuck_  - doing that.”  
  
Ryan’s lips curl into a smirk, a mirth that only he knows.  
  
“I think we both know I’ll be doin’ more than that.”  
  
Another hand spreads itself over the small if my back and down to my ass, gripping and kneading at the overheated flesh until a finger - or maybe a thumb? I’ve lost all sense of lucidity, splayed out and wanting for him - presses itself against my entrance. My body freezes underneath him but it won’t let me be a liar, my cock twitching almost violently. His filthy smirk becomes victorious, the edges curling upwards still, passing a lone finger over my weeping slit.  
  
My world that has become these sheets and this room and the smell of his sweat spirals out from under me as the pressure increases. Most definitely his thumb; I wheeze through trembling lungs as it sinks to the first knuckle. Whispering incoherently under my breath, I try to rationalize how a digit that seems so skeletal at first glance can feel so invasive as it stretches my rim, pain mixed with the slightest jolts of pleasure. His other fist continues to stroke my cock to take away the discomfort until my body ignores it, pressing my hips back in a search for more of him. This has happened before. A long time ago in a life I barely remember with someone who doesn’t mean anything anymore, five months, six, but I never remembered it being like this, feeling like the entirety of me is imploding.  
  
It’s strange that it feels so natural but so awkward at once - he pushes into the second knuckle before carefully inserting the third, letting its weight rest pressing against my insides. One forearm is thrown across my eyes, my kiss-swollen lip drawn between my teeth as the burn pulsates stronger, causing me to twitch away; I muffle a whimper as he shifts his weight around, the quiet opening of a drawer almost missed in my stimulated haze.  
  
Ryan leaves me desperate and gasping for breath as a plastic snap breaks through my panting - cold liquid is dribbled onto the stretch of my entrance and I yelp, almost pulling free of his grip. He soothes me with a long, silent look, stripping me all the way down to my bones; my face turns red at his critical gaze, but the reprimand that sits on the tip of my tongue strangles on a moan as the lube slicks his thumb and lets the next pass become effortless.  
  
I’ve lost sense of time as he pushes my legs closer to my head, the probing length of his thumb replaced by a long finger that rubs and twists within me. It feels like little else I’ve felt and believe I’ll ever feel again, and as he carefully adds a second I choke out a warning too late; my body seizes, toes curling, stomach clenching, and with a shuddered groan I tumble over the edge, sticky-hot white streaks spattering along my stomach and collar bone.  
  
He pauses momentarily and I catch a brief glimpse of his eyebrows raising to his hairline, but I hum with a contentment not felt since this whole impossible trip began; muscles lax, he rubs at the tender stretch and a third finger presses at my rim, testing the limits that my body has left behind. I mumble nonsensical things as he fills me and my cock begins to harden again against my stomach, sticky with come and saliva.  
  
“Think you’re ready,” he mumbles to himself more than me, hastily ridding himself of the slacks that poorly hid the bulge that pressed outwards until I could easily see every defining feature. He strokes his cock, heavy and flushed in his hand, and I see it twitch in time with his heartbeat when I spread my legs wider. Ryan smirks and my cheeks burn, spreading over the bridge of my nose, but he tweaks my nipple so suddenly that my lips pop onto into a gasp and he takes the opportunity to violate my mouth - lips and vicious teeth, leaving blooming bruises that he soothes with a hot, intrusive swipe of his tongue. I groan and let him in (just like I  _always_  will), my arms slinging like weights around his neck until I drag him down on top of me.  
  
So occupied with his chest sliding against mine, I don’t notice the head of his cock pressing against my entrance until it slides its way inside, stretching in a way his fingers couldn’t - my back arches and he takes the opportunity to suck at my neck that trembles, caught in a whirlwind of his scent and sight. Ryan whispers filthy things as he pumps his hips; jabbing thrusts that ever so slowly spear me deeper and deeper, his girth pulling and pressing and prodding until I can feel him  _pulsing_  inside of me, claiming me in some way I can't justify. He groans, pulling back, his hands smoothing roughly down the heave of my chest until he can grip at my hips and leave twin claims, fingerprints that seem more effective than any signature.  
  
“So fuckin’ hot,” he grunts, tilting to better watch me, helpless and breathless. I try to protest but his heavy girth takes my thoughts, wiping them clean and leaving nothing but a gaping hole for more. My cock throbs against my stomach but I can’t will my hands to move from where they clench the bedsheets, knuckles white and burning. “Just look at you."  
  
The dry husk of his voice makes every part of me tingle and come alive, blushing and flushing at the same time; the air is humid as my jaw hangs open, panting with each thrust as he knocks the wind from my lungs. I fist at my hair and dig my head back into the pillow, willing myself not to come again.  
  
A hand against my stomach makes me open my eyes and I lock gazes with him; his sight has moved from his cock pushing into me to my face, studying and calculating, watching with a thought I’m not yet privileged to know. Him looking at me when I’m like this, spread open and wordlessly squirming is too much, and my limp arms to their best to pull him down to combat how suddenly cold it’s gotten without his skin pressed to mine.  
  
Ryan follows soundlessly, and the new angle makes his hips stutter for a moment before the thrusts become shorter, more of a grinding motion into me that makes me choke on a moan - he steals the sound from my throat and licks his devil’s tongue across the roof of my mouth until I exhale the air he breathes, his ribs expanding with my offering that presses against the sweaty expanse of my chest. I can’t feel anything except him inside me or the burning of my body, but between us passes something too great to understand.  
  
He feels it; his body curls into me, thighs bracketing my hips until I’m almost stretched out in his lap, and one of his sinning hands snakes down until it just loosely circles my aching cock, running his wet fingers lightly up my shaft. My whole body jerks, caught under his spell, but I refuse to break eye contact as his thumb traces my leaking slit and spreads my own arousal down and further still to where we’re joined so intimately. Ryan’s eyes are so very dark, deep and warm, and there is a fondness in his stare that translates to the rotating grind of his hips that has me crying out into his waiting mouth.  
  
“Fuck, Bren…” he murmurs, and my name said so tenderly in his voice gone rough with lust nearly undoes me, but it’s the way he holds my cock so softly that makes my legs wrap tightly around his waist, squeezing every last ounce of pleasure from his body pressed so firmly to mine as I come around him.  
  
Sometime after I feel him stumble and tense, and his length pulses and swells as he spills himself deep inside of me, a mumbled string of my name laced with profanity lost in the sweat-damp skin of my neck.  
  
A long, heavy silence follows, laced with our ragged breaths, and I feel drained, completely exhausted and clinging to the ridges of Ryan’s shoulderblades for something to tether me to the earth.  
  
“I love you,” I finally mumble into his hair, fingers tracing nonsensical patterns across the nape of his neck. It’s so much simpler than I was making it. A fact of life. The sky is blue, all things must eventually die, and I love him. There’s a comfort and a clarity in it that spreads beneath my skin like a sunrise, warming the deepest parts of me. My decisions have all gotten easier with three small words.  
  
“Love you too,” he practically slurs out, his face still buried in the hollow of my neck, tremulous aftershocks jittering down his spine. After a long stretch of time, Ryan finally sighs and pulls out of me carefully, drawing a whine of protest at the loss of him from the center of my chest. He blinks down at me almost disbelievingly before flopping down beside me in the unholy mess of the blankets, eyes fixed blankly on the ceiling as he paws around on the top of the nightstand for the crumpled carton of Marlboro Reds sitting beside the lamp.  
  
“You probably can’t smoke in here,” I hum idly.  
  
“D’you really think I give a damn?”  
  
Laughing sleepily, I roll over onto my side, relishing the ache in my bones as I curl into him. That means it was real. That means it happened. “I guess it’s accurate what they all say about there being a party at the end of the world.”  
  
Ryan frowns around a drag of his cigarette, and something like fear skitters up my spine, a fragmented thought that I’ve probably said something wrong (again) cutting through my sleepy, satiated haze. But it’s a contemplative sort of expression, one that deepens before he finally speaks slowly, carefully. “I… we don’t know what’s gonna happen after tomorrow, Bren. I could die, you could die, the whole fuckin’ world could go to hell in a fast car and there might not be shit we can do about it. I just wanted to do this in a time and place where it would be certain. Where  _we_ would be certain.”  
  
“I’ll accept that,” I mumble against the skin of his shoulder, perching my chin on his chest and meeting his eyes across the bluish darkness of the room. “Although I’d argue that we’ll be certain even when the rest of the world is anything but.”  
  
“Fair enough. Now get some sleep. This is the last you’ll see of a bed in a good long while,” Ryan yawns, stubbing his cigarette out in one of the hotel’s water glasses and winding spindly arms around me.  
  
“I don’t want to-”  
  
“Go to  _sleep_ , Brendon.”  
  
“Fuck you, I’m not…”  _tired_ , I try to say, my fingers finding a soft solace in the hollows between his ribs, but the world spirals away before I can finish my sentence, fading into nothing but the soft give of the mattress beneath my weight and Ryan’s heartbeat thrumming in my ear.  
  
I could die, he could die, the whole fucking world could go to hell in a fast car and there might not be shit we can do about it.  
  
But I love him. Even if that’s all the certainty I have right now, I think I’ll be all right.


End file.
